The Counterfeit Agent

20

Wells skipped the cab line at Atatürk Airport. He walked outside the terminal until he spotted a black Toyota compact with a scrape on its bumper and a plastic sign dangling from its mirror. “TAXI,” red letters on a white background. The kind of sign that could be pulled down in a moment if the police passed by. A fiftyish man in a blue jacket sat behind the wheel. He smiled as he lowered his window, revealing a mouthful of cracked brown teeth. Wells leaned in, looked for a meter, didn’t find one. Good.

“I want to hire you for the day.”

The driver raised his caterpillar-sized eyebrows. “Six hundred lira, good price. Plus petrol. My English good, I learn in UK, show you around, tour guide.”

Six hundred Turkish lira equaled about three hundred dollars. Hardly cheap for this jalopy, but no matter. “No tour guide.”

“Okay, five hundred fifty.”

“I may want you to follow someone.”

“Chase?”

“Follow. Not too fast.”

“Chase who?”

“Whoever.”

“For chase one thousand lira. Still plus petrol. To catch, three thousand.”

“Long as the jokes are free.” Wells stowed his bag in back, folded himself into the seat beside the cabbie. It was covered with the mats of wooden beads that taxi drivers inexplicably liked. He wrenched his seat back, wedged his knees under the dash.

“Big man.”

“Small car.” The space around his feet was littered with candy wrappers and a water bottle filled with a pale yellow liquid that wasn’t Gatorade. “Ever clean this thing?”

“Tomorrow.”

Wells gave the cabbie five one-hundred-lira notes. “This to start.” About two hundred fifty dollars, more than the guy would make in a week. The driver tucked the bills in his shirt pocket like he couldn’t be bothered to count them. He put the Toyota in gear and they merged into the airport traffic.

“This is, what, a one-liter engine?”

“One-point-four.”

“I don’t think we have to worry about catching anyone.” Wells wondered if he could push his legs through the floor, help with acceleration like Fred Flintstone. As an answer, the cabbie downshifted, gunned the engine. The Toyota responded with a surprising burst. Again the cabbie waggled his eyebrows. He seemed inordinately proud of them.

“What your name?”

“Roger.” Wells didn’t return the question, but he had a feeling the guy wouldn’t take the hint.

“I am Kemal. Popular name. For Atatürk.” Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the general who had founded modern Turkey.

“Nice.” Wells closed his eyes, hoping to catch up on the sleep he’d missed in Phuket.

“No, too popular. His name all over. This airport, everywhere.”

“I’m going to find out a lot about you, aren’t I?”

Wells wished he had backup. But back in Thailand, Shafer and Duto had told him that asking the seventh floor for help would be pointless. Another piece of intel had arrived from the Istanbul source. The agency was still confirming it, but Hebley considered it serious enough that he had briefed the President and the National Security Advisor. He was calling it a “direct threat to CONUS.” Continental United States.

“What is it?” Wells said.

“They’re holding it tight,” Shafer said.

“Inside guys who aren’t inside anymore. Worse than tits on a bull.”

“John—”

“Stop pretending you’re pulling your weight.”

“Get a photo,” Duto said. “Don’t have to bring him in, don’t even have to talk to him. Just a good-quality photo.”

“I got you the surgery. A phone.”

“Seventh floor won’t even consider the possibility he’s alive without a photo.”

“They can have Bangkok station send someone to the plastic-surgery place. Singh will confirm Mason was there.”

“Forget it, John. They aren’t interested.”

“How’s a photo change that?”

“Because it’s easy to understand. It’s not a weird theory about some screwy ex — ops officer who changed his identity and is playing dead. And we don’t even know who he’s working for, but this one doctor in the middle of Thailand might confirm it. You think Hebley wants to hear that craziness? You think the President does? This decision is hard enough. He wants concrete choices. He doesn’t want to have to guess at the facts. Takes something real to break through that mind-set. A photo’s real. I can shove it at them, say, Lookee here, Mason’s alive, Mason’s in Istanbul, we need to figure out why. Even a general can understand that. Even a reporter can understand that.”

Wells could hardly argue Duto’s authority on how the White House worked.

“You get the picture, John?”

“Fine.”

“So get the picture. Call me when you have something not completely useless.”

Wells hung up. So he’d have no help in Istanbul. Not unless he brought it himself. He stayed in touch with a couple operators but he trusted only one for a job this sensitive, an ex-Delta named Brett Gaffan. And Gaffan was out of pocket, on his honeymoon. He’d married a twenty-four-year-old named Svetlana, ignoring his buddies’ warnings that Russian women were the female equivalent of avalanches: beautiful, destructive, and best viewed from a safe distance.

As a rule, Wells didn’t mind operating alone. But here he was caught among Mason, the agency, maybe the Iranian government. Once again he found himself in the uncomfortable position of playing detective in a country where he had no police powers. Plus he didn’t speak the language. Having somebody to watch his six would have been nice.

Kemal the cabbie would have to do.

At least Wells had a fix on Mason’s phone, and presumably his safe house. It was in Nisantası, northeast of Taksim Square. Istanbul’s cosmopolitan elite and foreign executives favored the neighborhood, whose narrow streets were lined with boutiques like Louis Vuitton and Chanel. Turkey’s government promoted a strict brand of Islam, but most of the country’s wealthy remained less observant, and happily lapped up brands that advertised luxury and sex.

Thanks to Shafer, or maybe Duto, the NSA had finally come through on Mason’s phone. Mason had been careful with it, using it only three times since Singh gave Wells the number. Even so, the NSA had triangulated it to a couple hundred meters in Nisantası. To get closer, Wells would use a handheld sniffer he’d gotten from the agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology. His final freebie before Duto left.

Essentially, the sniffer worked as a homing device, tracking the handset by spoofing the signals from a local cellular tower. As long as the target phone was on, it could be tracked. Best of all, the DST geeks assured him it should work almost everywhere in the world without new software. Telecom companies wanted customers to have access to one another’s networks when they traveled internationally, so they used standardized software and routing systems. The sniffer could find a phone in Buenos Aires as easily as Los Angeles.

Istanbul’s afternoon traffic gave Kemal time to tell Wells his life story. The cabbie had learned English in Manchester, where he was studying to be an electrical engineer. Back home, he’d worked for the national power company, TEK.

“After nineteen years, they fire me. Wife take daughters back to Izmir. Divorce.”

Wells grunted.

“Too much raki. You know raki?” He tipped an imaginary bottle to his mouth. “Like whiskey.”

“You still drink?”

“Oh, yes.” Kemal said the words almost proudly. “Why stop now?”

“Excellent point.”

“What about you, Roger? You have wife?”

Wells wondered what answer would shut Kemal up quickest. “Yes. We’re very happy.”

That did the trick.

Light snow coated the sidewalks as they turned onto Tesvikiye, a boulevard that gave its name to one of the richest parts of Nisantası. Mason’s safe house was somewhere in here. “Where now?”

“Just drive.”

Kemal piloted the Toyota through the narrow one-way lanes that dominated Tesvikiye. The area sloped steeply toward the Bosphorus. Midrise apartment buildings were packed together, and surveillance cameras common. Wells wondered why Mason had picked the area. Maybe Mason had his main safe house in a cheaper neighborhood, and this was simply an expensive backup. Considering the resources Mason seemed to have, the idea wasn’t far-fetched.

Wells realized that finding the handset might be harder than he’d hoped. Dozens of apartment buildings fell within the target area, hundreds of apartments. Mason would have to turn on his phone for several minutes for Wells to have a chance.

Half an hour later, they had exhausted every street in Tesvikiye and were driving slowly along Abdu Ipekçi, which abutted the park on the neighborhood’s western edge. A car pulled out from the curb in front of them, leaving an open spot. “Take it.”

Kemal looked sulkily at Wells, then pulled in.

“The man you look for, you have picture?”

“An old one.”

“Quite a pickle.”

“You really were in England.”

“I call cousins. Give them picture, we watch.”

Wells feared Kemal’s cousins would stick out in this fancy nabe even more than he did. “Let’s give it time.”

As if on cue, a fast electronic beeping sounded from the backseat. The sniffer was designed so it could pass for a phone and be used in public without attracting attention. The top of its screen showed the mobile number it was tracking. In the center, a white dot indicated its current location. A red dot — now in the upper-right corner — showed the target handset’s location. In the United States, a street grid would have been programmed in. Here the rest of the screen was blank.

Wells grabbed the Toyota’s keys, in case Kemal was thinking about leaving. He pulled on a baseball cap, the cheapest cover possible, and stepped into the dark. He wasn’t planning to break into Mason’s apartment. Not yet, anyway. Find the guy, then hire a professional photographer for long-lens surveillance shots. Duto and Shafer wanted pictures, Wells would get them a yearbook’s worth.

Wells walked up the hill, turned right. The screen blanked out, then came back. Either the hills were blocking the target signal or the device didn’t work internationally as seamlessly as the DST claimed. With no grid and no scale, Wells couldn’t tell exactly how far away Mason’s handset was.

He turned left, edging past two women wearing fur coats more suitable for Moscow. He carried the screen close to his jacket, like a guy trying to watch the playoffs at a wedding. Nothing about this job had been easy. But he was close now. He made another right, onto a two-block street, too small and narrow to attract high-end retailers. According to the device in his hand, Mason was somewhere on this street. Wells was close. So close—

The dots disappeared. The screen went black.

The phone number went, too. The snooper hadn’t lost the signal this time. Mason had finished his call, turned off the handset. Showing decent discipline. Still, the street was short enough for Wells to see every target building. When the phone came back on, Wells should find him.

Wells was slightly surprised that Mason was using an old phone so much. But even the most security-crazed operative needed one permanent number for people who needed to reach him quickly and with certainty. With this new operation coming together, he was rushing, getting sloppy.

Back at the Toyota, Kemal sipped a half-liter bottle of clear liquid.

“Raki.” He offered it to Wells.

Wells shook his head. Kemal took another hit from the bottle and turned up the radio, premillennial Britney Spears.

“Can’t imagine why your wife left you.”

“She likes this even more than me. Oops I did it again.”

Wells would never understand why the world loved the trashiest parts of American culture the most. Kemal took a long pull off the bottle. His throat thumped like a fish on a line. Great. A drunk wheelman.

“Don’t suppose you know where I can find a pistol. A nice nine-millimeter?”

“Gun? No, no.”

“You’re not that innocent, Kemal.”

As an answer, Kemal took another slug.

“Now what?”

Wells was famished. He hadn’t eaten since Dubai, twelve hours before. “Dinner.”

Kemal steered them to Cumhuriyet, a broad avenue at the edge of Nisantası, and much less fancy. They chose a one-room restaurant, pressed-wood walls and plastic chairs, almost a cafeteria. The lamb was cooked to tasteless gray-brown pellets. Wells devoured his plate, ordered another. Kemal claimed he wasn’t hungry, but Wells made him choke down a kebab to sop up the raki.

“You don’t eat like an American,” Kemal said.

“How do I eat?”

“Like a prisoner.”

Wells popped a piece of stale pita in his mouth.

“This man we looking for—”

“We’re not talking about that.”

“One question, then. You come here yourself, to find him. How come no one helps you?”

Words that reminded Wells that he had not even a week before Anne’s deadline. He wished she were here. Or at least that he could tell her about everything he’d seen since Miami, the half-drunk man sitting with him now. Of the loneliness that streamed through the winter woods of the world. He reached for his phone. To tell her that he loved her. To tell her that she was right, he would give up this life.

She would tell him to come home.

He would have to tell her he couldn’t, not quite yet. Soon, but not quite yet.

What would she say then? Nothing at all, he suspected. And he would be left with the dull aftertaste of cruelty on his tongue. He put away the phone. “Let’s go.”

The street where Wells had tracked the phone was too narrow for parking, but after circling the neighborhood Kemal found a spot around the corner from its north end. Mason’s street ran one way north to south, so if someone was picking him up tonight, the vehicle would have to pass them.

Nisantası went to bed early. By nine p.m., the streets emptied. The area took on the buttoned-up feel peculiar to wealthy city neighborhoods at night. Lights flicked on behind curtained windows, the details of life hidden from the commoners below.

A low stream of pop music provided the car’s only soundtrack. Kemal sipped from his bottle, nursing it until only drops remained. Just before midnight Wells felt his phone buzzing. Shafer.

“Ellis.”

“You in Constantinople?”

“Yes.”

“Close to our friend?”

“I think so, yes.”

“That threat, it’s confirmed. Before you ask, that’s all I know. Whatever game these people are playing, they are not messing around. Get that picture and get gone.”

Wells hung up.

A few minutes later, Kemal stirred. “How much longer tonight?”

“Let’s say until one. Come back tomorrow.”

“You pay five hundred extra.”

Wells was about to argue when the sniffer sounded again. The target was maybe fifty meters south. One of the buildings on the two-block street. Headlights lit the back window. Wells ducked low as a BMW sedan rolled past.

“Start the car and wait.” Wells jogged to the corner, peeked around. The sedan waited outside an apartment building at the south end of the street. Wells couldn’t get a clear look, much less a good photo, without exposing himself. A man in a pea jacket and jeans stepped out of the building, into the back of the BMW. At this distance, Wells couldn’t be sure it was Mason.

He ran for the cab, slid in back.

“Follow him. Not too close.”

Whatever his love for raki, Kemal piloted the Toyota smoothly. Wells lay on the backseat, head down, staring at his phone, mapping their route. They turned left, right, left again, northeast along the causeway on the shore of the Bosphorus. Wells guessed they were headed for the expressway that ran along the city’s northern edge and spanned the Bosphorus at the Sultan Mehmet Bridge. Maybe Mason was headed for a safe house on the Asian side. A few minutes later they accelerated up a ramp. But instead of going over the bridge, they turned west. Away. After another five minutes, they slowed, turned onto another ramp, accelerated again.

“South now,” Kemal said from the front seat. “Back to the city.”

The map showed Wells where they were, but he didn’t know Istanbul well enough to have any idea whether Mason’s route made sense. They’d traveled north on surface roads, west on the expressway, now south on another expressway. This ride stank of a countersurveillance trap.

They turned off the highway. “Beyoglu,” Kemal said. They were moving southeast, into the city center. After driving a half hour, they were only a couple kilometers from Mason’s apartment.

“Someone following us,” Kemal said. “Mercedes, black. We turn, he turn.”

Wells wondered if the Mercedes was after him. Or Mason.

The night brightened as they returned to Istanbul’s clotted heart. They turned left, stopped at a light, came up a hill. Then a right. Wells lifted his head to see if he could spot the Mercedes. But traffic here was heavy despite the hour, and he couldn’t.

“Near Taksim.” Another right. “Tarlabası. Big street. Big traffic.”

After another minute. “Okay. The BM pulling over. Two men getting out. Now the BM going again.”

“Pull over.” Wells looked through the rear right passenger window. The man in jeans and pea jacket was walking with a second man. He turned his head and Wells saw him in profile. His face was flatter and squarer — more Thai, somehow — than the presurgery pictures of Glenn Mason. And he was wearing a hood that shrouded his face. Yet Wells knew. This was Mason.

After three continents, four weeks of searching, Wells had found his man. He felt more relieved than elated. He hadn’t wasted his time. He wanted to jump Mason, drag him into Kemal’s car. But of course that was impossible. Anyway, as Shafer kept telling him, he didn’t need to arrest Mason, just get one good photo.

“The Mercedes,” Kemal said.

Too late for Wells to duck. He sat still as the black sedan drove by. It had tinted windows, and he had no hope of getting the plate. Wells had no way to tell whether it was tracking Mason or working with him, but the latter seemed more likely.

On the sidewalk ahead, the two men ducked onto a dark side street that disappeared down a steep hill.

“Very bad there,” Kemal said. “No police. Thieves. Drugs.”

“Go to Taksim, wait for me.” Wells opened the door.

“How long?”

“Two hours. You don’t see me, come back here in the morning. But be careful. Watch out for that Mercedes.”

“You pay now.”

Wells scribbled Shafer’s number on a page from his reporter’s notebook. “I don’t come back, call this man. In America. Tell him what happened. Where we went. He’ll pay you.”

Kemal shook his head but took the paper. “Inshallah, my friend.”

“Inshallah.”

Wells stepped out, oriented himself. Tarlabası was a wide two-way avenue. Wells stood on its western side, with traffic flowing south past him. The commuter hub of Taksim Square marked the avenue’s northern end, and million-dollar apartments were only a few hundred meters east.

Yet as Wells walked to the nameless street where Mason had turned, he realized the truth of Kemal’s warning. Down the hill he saw not a single streetlight. Not a storefront, open or closed. Fifty meters down, three men huddled around a burning garbage can, shifting against the cold. Tarlabası’s traffic obviously worked as a barrier between this blighted area and the wealth on higher ground to the east.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Wells saw Mason and his friend maybe a hundred meters ahead. Why had they come here at midnight? Why the long countersurveillance run? The moves stank of setup. Either they were trying to lose a tail, or trap one. But Wells had to take the bait. If Mason knew Wells was after him and Wells didn’t bite tonight, Mason would toss his phone and Wells would lose him again. On the other hand, if Mason was really meeting someone down here, Wells could fade into these black streets until he got the picture he needed.

So he told himself. But he knew that logic didn’t fully explain his insistence on chasing Mason into this maze without backup or even a pistol. He hadn’t come this far to back off now. You want to play? Think you can take me? Good. Start the clock.

Wells reached the garbage can. Ahead, Mason stopped walking. Wells stepped close to the can. The sputtering flame inside was as hopeless as the men around it. They had the drawn faces and sallow skin of heroin addicts, dying from the inside out.

Wells counted seven, looked down the hill. Mason and the other man were turning left onto a side street. Wells followed. The smell of sewage grew more insistent. Rats jumped from a trash pile and slipped one by one into a hole in the sidewalk, like soldiers scrambling for cover. Farther down, Wells passed an empty husk of a building, its windows gone, its crumbling bricks covered with posters that warned against trespassing.

He reached the street where Mason had turned left. It ran north-south, parallel to Tarlabası. It was narrower than the street where Wells now walked, barely wide enough for a car to pass. Wells peeked around the corner. Mason stood near the end of the block, rapping on a door on the right side of the street, the west side. The door opened, and Mason and his buddy disappeared inside.

Tarlabası was maybe two hundred fifty meters away. Even with the hill, at a full run Wells would reach it in less than a minute. He had never felt so imprisoned by his own desire to hunt. He knew the odds he faced a trap were at least fifty-fifty. Yet he walked on.

Six front doors ran down the right side of the street, spaced about every twenty-five feet. But the buildings above them actually formed a single structure, five stories high. One building, split with separate entrances and street numbers, to give the illusion it was six. Mason had walked in the fifth door down.

Wells pulled his autopick and went for the first door. The lock gave so fast that Wells wondered if it had been set at all. The stairs were dark, but Wells chose speed over stealth, hurdling stairs two at a time. If this was a trap, Mason would want to draw Wells as far down the hill as possible before dropping the net. The pursuit would stay loose to keep from tipping Wells off. Still, a couple guys would be behind him. When they came around the corner and didn’t see him, they would know something was wrong. So Wells needed to move quickly now. He reached the top floor, kept climbing. Bad as the neighborhood was, basic fire codes still applied. The building had to have a fire door to the roof. Wells figured the door wouldn’t have an alarm. It didn’t.

The roof was slick with melted sleet. Wells found a chunk of paving stone, jammed open the door to be sure that it wouldn’t lock from the inside. He crunched a hypodermic needle under his boot as he stepped around a narrow mattress. He jumped over the half-wall that sectioned the building, landed clean, kept moving. When he reached the fifth section of the building, the section he’d seen Mason enter, he stopped.

On the street beneath him, footsteps. Wells crab-walked to the edge of the building, peeked over. Two men stood below, heads swiveling, pistols loose in their right hands. The front door beneath Wells opened and a third man came out.

So a trap. Mason had known he was coming. Maybe Singh had told him. A man came here, he said he was Saudi, he knew all about you… Mason, or whoever was in charge, had laid the crumbs just so. They’d given Wells a taste of Mason’s phone to draw him out. They’d run the countersurveillance to see whether Wells was part of a team or working alone. And Wells had taken the bait like the world’s dumbest fish.

At least he wasn’t surprised. Furious for his foolishness, but not surprised.

He heard footsteps coming up the stairs below. He scuttled back to the fire door. The high ground was a basic tactical advantage, and Mason’s men would want it. They ought to have had someone on the roof already, but they weren’t perfect.

The fire stairs were identical to those Wells had taken. They were covered by a half-pyramid that rose from the roof and ended in a door that swung open to the left. Wells crouched on the right side of the pyramid. He was betting the man inside was right-handed. He would push the bar with his left hand, lead with his right. His gun hand. He’d be close to the right edge of the door frame.

The man below ran along the fifth-floor hallway, turned, came up the stairs—

Wells drew his knife. Three seconds, two, one—

The door popped open. With his left hand, Wells grabbed the man’s outstretched right wrist. He jerked the man’s right arm up so the pistol pointed uselessly into the air. As he did, he spun around the door frame into the man. The guy couldn’t stop his momentum, couldn’t keep from impaling himself on the knife Wells held. He grunted, too surprised to scream, as Wells worked the blade deep into him. The pistol fell from his hand, and Wells left the knife inside him and shoved him back down the stairs and slammed the door shut as the man tumbled backward, thumping down the stairs, cursing. Wells didn’t particularly care whether the man lived or died. He’d needed a pistol and now he had one. He reached down now, grabbed it. A Sig Sauer, which didn’t necessarily mean anything either way.

More important was the fact that the guy hadn’t been wearing a tac radio. A Delta or SOG team would surely have been miked up. So would elite Israeli, Russian, or European units. Another sign that these guys were private, not government, unless they were so deep undercover that they felt they couldn’t carry the proper tactical gear.

A man yelled from deep inside the building, and Wells knew he had to move. The guy he’d stabbed was out of commission, but his friends would be up soon enough. Time to take his new pistol and run. Still, he had a chance. The men coming up the stairs would have to approach cautiously in case Wells was waiting to shoot down at them.

Wells retraced his steps, running north, vaulting the half-walls. As he reached the second section of the building, he heard shouting from the stairwell where he’d stabbed the operative. Then two quick shots, and two more. So Mason’s men had given up any hope of taking Wells silently. He was surprised they weren’t carrying suppressed pistols. Another tactical error. Maybe they’d figured they wouldn’t need them, that they would overpower him before he could respond.

Three more shots echoed from the stairwell as Wells leapt over the final half-wall. If he could get to the first staircase before his pursuers reached the roof, they would have no way of knowing where he’d gone. But he tripped on the edge of the mattress, landed hard on his right shoulder. His momentum carried him to the edge of the sleet-slicked roof. His heels slid over as he swiped at a vent pipe. For a moment his fingers failed to find purchase on the slick metal and he imagined himself tumbling sixty feet to the alley below, bouncing off brick as he fell. He dug in and finally stopped his slide. He picked himself up, ran for the fire door. As he stepped inside, he heard shouting. The stumble had ended his chance for a clean escape. They’d seen him. He shifted the pistol to his left hand and vaulted down the stairs.

Mason’s men didn’t have radios, but they had phones. Right now they would be calling one another, fixing his position. Five floors of stairs gave them too much time. They would set up outside the front door, gun him down as he tried to leave. But he couldn’t go back to the roof, either. They were up there now.

He needed another move.

Each of the six sections of the building was set up in classic tenement style, four apartments per floor, one on each corner. From the roof Wells had seen that the buildings one street west had lower rooflines, because they’d been built shorter and because they were farther down the hill. A narrow alley, no more than three feet, separated Wells’s building from the structures that backed it to the west.

On the third floor, Wells stopped. A dim light glowed under the door to the apartment in the building’s back right corner. Wells shoved his automatic pick into the lock. “Asalaam aleikum,” he said, loudly enough for anyone inside to hear. He opened the door, slowly. Inside, a naked lightbulb hung above a coffee table crammed with cheap children’s toys. A Turkish man in a dirty white T-shirt stood blocking an open hallway. He was small and wiry and held a cleaver high in his right hand.

Wells kicked the door shut. He kept his pistol on the man as he stepped crosswise to the window at the back of the apartment. “I’m not here to hurt you or your family.” This in Arabic, his voice low and calm. The man might not know the words. But the language itself, the language of the Quran, would reassure him.

The window was dirty, stuck shut. Wells tugged it up. As he’d hoped, the roofline of the building across the alley was several feet lower than the windowsill. He ought to be able to jump across. Wells pointed out the window, back to himself.

The man nodded.

Wells leaned halfway out the window, then looked over his shoulder at the man. For now Wells still had his right hand free and could cover the guy with his pistol. But to get himself through the window he would have to twist both shoulders through. Wells would be facing away from the man, who could throw the cleaver at him or just run across the apartment and push him out. Wells wouldn’t be able to defend himself.

Wells had to trust this civilian whose house he’d invaded. Or shoot him.

“Hamdulillah.” Peace be with you. The man nodded again. Wells turned away, squeezed through the window, brought his knees underneath him. He wouldn’t have much momentum, but the alley was so narrow that he shouldn’t need much.

He jumped. The drop to the opposite roof was only about six feet, but Wells didn’t stick the landing cleanly. His knees buckled and he rolled forward onto his right shoulder. A pile of bricks stopped him. He permitted himself one look back. The man with the cleaver stood openmouthed at the window.

Wells pulled himself upright. He’d come down hard on his left foot, which was permanently tender after an injury years before in Afghanistan. No matter. Mason’s men wouldn’t know where he’d gone. By the time they realized he was no longer inside the other building, he would be blocks away.

This building made the one across the alley look like a luxury high-rise. It had no interior lights at all. Wells limped down the stairs, plotting his next move. His foot might not get him far, but he could hole up for the night in an abandoned building. He had the pistol. And Mason’s team couldn’t chase him forever. Even in this neighborhood, multiple shots and a pack of armed men would eventually draw police.

Wells opened the front door, limped out—

And was hit by the four round front headlights of a Mercedes sedan. After the darkness of the hallway, they were more than enough to blind him. He reflexively raised a hand to shield his eyes. To his left, someone — a woman—said, “Drop your weapon.”

Wells flicked his head, tried to see her. Couldn’t.

“You’re pinned.” Her voice calm and level.

He had nowhere to go. He couldn’t run. If he went back in the building, he’d succeed only in getting himself killed. Along with a bunch of innocent people.

He dropped to his knees. Tossed the pistol to the street. He watched it go with regret, though it had proven as useless for him as its previous owner.

“Lie on your stomach with your hands behind your back.”

Wells didn’t think she planned to kill him. She could have done that when he stepped out of the door. In any case, when he’d thrown away the pistol he’d given up his choice. He kissed the rough street, more dirt than pavement, and knitted his hands behind his back. He wished he knew how they’d found him. Probably they’d seen him from the other roof.

Mostly he was furious at himself. Too many chances, too many years running alone, too many close calls. Finally, his luck had run out. No one knew where he was. Even if Kemal the taxi driver kept his promise to call Shafer, Wells didn’t see how anyone would track him.

Two pairs of footsteps crunched his way. A big man put a knee in his back and flex-cuffed his arms together. A penlight traced his face. “This will pinch,” the woman said.

A needle bit into his neck. Wells lifted his head to protest, but the black water inside the syringe filled him. A heartbeat later, it rose to his brain and covered his thoughts. Nothing could stop it, not fury nor willpower nor all the world’s desperation.

His mouth fell slack and he slept.

21

Flying flat out, a Black Hawk made the thirteen-mile run from Langley to the White House in eight minutes. Normally, Scott Hebley loved the trip. The helicopter raced low over the Potomac’s brown waters, came over the Lincoln Memorial with the Washington Monument ahead. Then turned toward the South Lawn and the great white building where history was made. The feeling of arriving at the absolute center of power couldn’t be explained to anyone on the outside.

Today, though, Hebley’s stomach grew more unsettled with every spin of the rotors. In Afghanistan, he had overseen the end of a war. The news he was about to present would move the United States close to a new one, against an army far larger than the Taliban. Hebley almost missed the Talibs. For all their bluster and savagery, when they saw they couldn’t fight his Marines, they simply retreated into Pakistan. They had never tried anything one-tenth as bold as what Iran was now doing, introducing a new generation to mutually assured destruction. Iran already menaced the entire Persian Gulf. How much more aggressive would the Islamic Republic become if it believed that it had an insurance policy to keep the United States from attacking?

The Black Hawk’s turbines whined as the helicopter slowed, descended, and finally touched down on the flat aluminum disks that served as the South Lawn’s discreet landing pad. Hebley unbuckled his harness and ignored the outstretched hand of a Secret Service agent as he stepped onto the wet grass. It was just past five p.m., and the sky was fading to black as the sun set behind a thick curtain of clouds.

The agent led Hebley to the door at the edge of the West Wing that was the building’s VIP entrance. He passed through a metal detector and his badge was swiped, necessary formalities even for the DCI. Only the President and his immediate family could enter without being checked.

Donna Green’s executive assistant waited for him. “The meeting’s been moved.” He had expected to talk with Green one-on-one before they met the President. Instead, she led him directly to the Oval Office.

Operation CHERRYPICK had gone smoothly, all things considered. The agency had flagged three ships as potential matches for the tip from its Rev Guard source. Its top target was the Kara Six, a midsized vessel that carried rugs and clothes from Pakistan to Europe and the United States. A month before, the Kara Six had loaded twenty thousand rugs and fifteen containers of T-shirts in its home port of Karachi. In Dubai, it picked up another six containers of African knickknacks destined for stores like Pier One. The captain of the Six was Hassim Sharif, a fifty-one-year-old who had grown up in a Pakistani town on the Gulf of Oman.

After leaving Dubai, the Six plugged along at a steady twenty-two knots, covering more than five hundred nautical miles a day. It gave the pirate-choked Somali coast a wide berth and passed without incident through the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean, and the Straits of Gibraltar. Its ultimate destination was the Port of Charleston, which had become increasingly popular for the easy access it offered to Atlanta and the Southeast.

The Six was twelve hundred miles east of South Carolina when a carrier battle group led by the USS Ronald Reagan found it. The Reagan positioned itself one hundred miles south of the Six, outside the standard Atlantic commercial shipping lanes. It launched an F-18 carrying two specially modified MK-46 torpedoes. Their warheads had been removed. Instead of exploding, they were designed to ram the ship’s propeller and tear off its blades.

MK-46s had been built to chase down and destroy Russian submarines. They had less than no trouble taking care of the Six. Thirty-seven minutes after the F-18 launched, the Reagan’s Tactical Operations Center reported that the Six was floating helplessly in six-foot waves, standard for the winter Atlantic. It had not sent any distress calls, probably because Captain Sharif had no idea why his ship had suddenly turned into a thirty-thousand-ton canoe.

Ten minutes later, the frigate USS Nicholas, helmed by Commander Sam Ivory, approached the Six. If its captain was surprised at the coincidence, he didn’t say so. Via ship-to-ship radio, he accepted Ivory’s offer to put divers in the water to check the propeller.

“I’d also like to send a team of engineers to look at your engine, Captain.”

“My men can make any necessary repairs.”

“I absolutely insist.”

The four-star admiral who commanded the Atlantic fleet had told Ivory the night before, We’re boarding that ship no matter what. Deniability is important, in case we’re wrong, in case we find nothing but a bunch of rugs. The search is more important. Moment comes when you need to put guns on him, you go ahead. The White House and I will back you all the way. You understand, Commander?

Ivory understood.

“You are saying I have no choice?” Sharif said.

“There’s always a choice, Captain.”

Half an hour later, Ivory stood on the Six’s bridge, along with six very well-armed sailors. The pretense that this was a routine rescue at sea had disappeared. An eight-member Nuclear Emergency Search Team had flown the night before from Andrews Air Force Base to the Reagan, then helicoptered to the Nicholas aboard two Seahawks. The team was about to board the Kara, carrying handheld radiation detectors and two trunks of more exotic equipment.

“Who are these men?” Sharif said.

“Just routine.”

“Routine what?”

“Your English is better than I expected.”

“We both know this is illegal.”

“You let me board voluntarily. My men are here to help get you to shore.” Both statements were technically true. If the nuclear search team came up empty, the U.S. Navy would happily tow the Kara Six to safety. Sharif and the crew might even get a few thousand dollars each for the inconvenience.

“It’s obvious that you disabled my ship.”

“I did nothing of the sort.” Again, technically true. The F-18 had come from the Reagan.

“Now you’ve blocked my sat phone. It doesn’t work since your destroyer appeared.”

“I appreciate the promotion, but it’s a frigate, Captain.”

“Even if you throw me overboard, my whole crew, you can’t make my ship vanish. My company knows where we are, half the Atlantic has seen us—”

Sharif was starting to annoy Ivory. “No one’s throwing anyone anywhere. I’ll be straight with you. If you have contraband on this vessel, you can make your life much easier if you show it to me. We’re going to find it.”

Like many captains, Sharif was heavy, out of shape. Shipboard cooks weren’t known for health food. He rubbed his belly now, as if it might have the answer. Ivory watched him calculate. The boarding might be illegal, but sometimes might made right. Sharif’s protest would wait until he docked.

“Let’s speak in my quarters.”

Ivory commanded ten times as many men as Sharif, but the Pakistani captain’s stateroom was twice the size of his. Merchant captains took their privileges seriously, especially when they hailed from caste-conscious developing countries.

Aside from its size, the room was unremarkable. A prayer rug filled one corner, beneath a compasslike device that indicated the direction of Mecca from anywhere in the world. Photos of Sharif and his family dotted the walls. Most notably, a flat-screen television and an expensive stereo system had been mounted beside Sharif’s bed.

Ivory had ignored the protests of his SEAL team leader and left his security team behind to come with Sharif. He figured a one-on-one meeting would be the fastest way to convince the captain to give up whatever he was hiding. Now Sharif reached into his desk drawer, and Ivory wondered if trusting him had been a mistake. But instead of a weapon, Sharif came up with a white plastic tube the size of a pen. Ivory’s face must have betrayed his ignorance. “E-cigarette,” Sharif said.

He put the tube to his lips and dragged. What would have been the lit end of the cigarette glowed red. He sucked for a few seconds and then exhaled a cloud of clear vapor.

“Very healthy.”

Ivory’s sarcasm seemed to escape Sharif. “Yes.” He waved around the tube. The gesture didn’t work nearly as well without a trail of smoke. “I don’t understand why the U.S. Navy is so interested in my ship. My nephew lives in United States.”

“A cabbie in New York.”

“An attorney in Dallas. Plus, like everyone, I watch American TV. So I know, you find drugs on my ship this way, it’s illegal, no arrest.”

“You think this is a drug interdict? I look like the Coast Guard? If all you have on this ship is heroin, hash, show me. I give you my word, captain to captain, we will get you to Charleston. Sell it outside police headquarters, no one will say boo.” Ivory figured he was telling the truth. The Navy wouldn’t want anyone looking at what it had done today.

“Truly?”

Ivory raised his right hand, spoke three words he had never expected would leave his lips. “Swear to Allah.”

“I trust you, then.”

And you have no choice.

Sharif went to his knees and reached under his bed. He dragged out an unusual-looking suitcase, a hard white plastic shell about the size of a rolling bag. Homing beacons attached to both sides, and a chain was padlocked around it. Sharif grunted as he dumped it on the couch. Ivory picked it up. It was heavy, at least fifty pounds.

“Twenty kilos heroin. You see, Commander. All this, disable my ship, for this.”

“Get the key and let’s take a look.”

“I am only courier.”

“Please tell me you’ve actually seen what’s in there.”

Along with a half-dozen active and retired Department of Energy engineers, the nuclear team included a bomb expert, Nelson Pearce. Pearce had served two tours as an explosives ordnance disposal technician in Iraq, managing to leave with his fingers and toes intact. He was a wiry black man who wore a perfectly pressed dress shirt and khakis. He walked into Sharif’s stateroom and without a word waved a pager-sized device over the suitcase.

“Captain Sharif says it’s filled with drugs,” Ivory said.

“Good news is I’m not getting unusual alpha or beta or gamma emissions.” Pearce looked at Sharif. “Is it trapped? Booby-trapped?”

Sharif shook his head.

“How do you know?”

Another shake.

“Glad we got that out of the way. Commander, I’m going to ask you and the captain to leave the room. Could be anywhere from ten minutes to an hour.”

“All the time you need.”

While Pearce positioned a portable X-ray scanner over the case, Ivory ordered two SEALs to bring Sharif to an empty maintenance room at the front of the hold. Sharif didn’t argue, tacitly acknowledging that he was now a prisoner aboard his own ship.

Twenty minutes later, Pearce called Ivory back to the stateroom. The scan had revealed thirteen brick-shaped objects inside the shell. Twelve were wrapped in plastic. The thirteenth was smaller, five inches long and three inches deep. It glowed red on the scanner’s screen like a tumor.

“Red indicates high density. Meaning it’s lined with lead to hide emissions. Specifically, gamma radiation.”

“So that would be like uranium.”

“No, sir. Highly enriched uranium emits almost no gamma radiation. It’s more or less safe to handle. Alpha emitters aren’t dangerous unless you swallow them. This would be cesium, cobalt. Possibly plutonium. To be sure, we have to open that box. You should talk to the Ph.D.s, but I’m not sure they’d be entirely comfortable doing that here.”

“I’ll ask.”

“One more thing. The density of those bricks didn’t match heroin. So I swabbed the case for explosives. We’re looking at fifteen kilos of Semtex.”

“Please tell me you didn’t see any detonators or wires.”

“No, sir. I think the case is safe to travel.”

“Then you guys can take it back to the Reagan, give my boss the good news in person.”

Maybe Sharif genuinely believed the case only held drugs. Maybe he had somehow convinced himself that he could talk his way out of this mess. He was wrong either way, but Ivory wanted to keep him cooperating as long as possible. He sat Sharif on a folding chair as the SEALs set up a digital camera.

“I am Commander Samuel Ivory of the USS Nicholas. This is Captain Hassim Sharif, of the Kara Six, a Pakistani-flagged vessel bound for the Port of Charleston. Captain Sharif has graciously agreed to this voluntary interview to discuss contraband carried aboard his ship. I want to thank him for his cooperation and remind him that the United States Navy does not interdict narcotics unless specifically requested by the Drug Enforcement Administration. No such request has been made in this case. Therefore, any illegal drugs are of no interest to me or anyone in the USN.”

Ivory turned off the camera. “That work for you?”

Sharif nodded. Ivory flicked the camera back on, and Sharif explained that he made the trip from Karachi to the United States three to four times each year. He always stopped in Dubai. There he made a habit of visiting the brothels that catered to the emirate’s expatriates. They were illegal, but the police tolerated them as long as they didn’t use local women. Sharif favored a place not far from the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. “Six Star Experience. Beautiful girls.”

On his previous stopover in Dubai, Sharif was waiting for a taxi outside the Six Star when a man joined him. He, too, had just finished up. “We spoke a few minutes. Then decided to have dinner.”

“Just like that?”

“Nothing to do on the ship, waiting to load. I know he’s not homosexual, he at Six Star, too. Long night. We have dinner, drink. We both like whiskey. I tell him about my ship. He say he has package he must get to America. Pay sixty thousand dollars.”

“Drug smuggling in Dubai — that’s punishable by death.”

“I see he not from Dubai. Anyway, the port busy, no one care about drugs. And he has very good plan.”

Ivory’s mother liked to say If stupid people didn’t insist on thinking they were smart, the world would be a lot simpler. He had never fully appreciated what she meant until now.

The arrangement to get the drugs to the Kara Six was simple, if brazen. The smuggler would pose as an electronics installer putting a flat-panel television in Sharif’s cabin. It was his responsibility to get the drugs past Dubai port security. When he was finished with the installation, he would leave the case under Sharif’s bed. The crew wouldn’t question what was happening. At sea or in port, Sharif was the unquestioned master of the Kara Six. He could have brought an elephant into the cargo hold and his sailors wouldn’t have peeped. In the unlikely event that Dubai customs agents ever searched the ship, Sharif would say he hadn’t known about the suitcase. Idiot greed had blinded him to the fact that the courts in Dubai would find his story exactly plausible enough to execute him.

“And how do you get it through American customs?” Ivory said.

“Two hundred kilometers from Charleston, I email. Then, exactly one hundred kilometers, I turn on beacons, throw case overboard.”

“So if you didn’t open the case, how did you know it was drugs?”

“He tell me heroin. What else would it be?”

“Tell me about this man.”

“He called himself Ahmad, but I don’t think that’s his name.”

“Where was he from?”

“I don’t know. Not Dubai.”

“This man gave you sixty thousand dollars to smuggle drugs. You must have looked him over. Could he have been Pakistani? Iranian?”

“No. Not Iran or the Gulf. Maybe Lebanese, Syrian.”

“He speak Arabic?”

“We talked in English. I don’t speak Arabic.”

“Height? Weight?”

“Maybe one meter eighty. Eighty kilos.” About six feet, one-seventy-five pounds.

“I don’t suppose you have a picture of him?”

Sharif shook his head.

“Okay, that was last time. Tell me about this time.”

“Two days after I throw the case overboard, I get email from him. Everything fine, I should tell him next time I’m going to America.”

“You have a phone for him? Email?”

“Only email. So six weeks ago, I tell him, we make same deal.”

Ivory thought of Sharif’s stateroom. “This time he installed the stereo.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Captain. I have to talk to my bosses. You may be here a while. Can I get you some water, something to eat?” Just keep him talking.

Sharif patted his pockets. “Just my cigarette.”

“Of course.”

An encrypted feed of the interview quickly made its way up the chain from the Nicholas to the Reagan to Atlantic fleet headquarters in Norfolk to the Pentagon and Langley. Meanwhile, NEST’s scientists opened the box in one of the lead-shielded emergency rooms near the Reagan’s nuclear reactor. Inside they found three hundred grams of cesium, enough for a nasty dirty bomb.

Now Hebley had the job of telling the President and the National Security Advisor what they’d found.

“Big day,” the President said when he was finished.

“Yes, sir. About the only good news was that we found cesium and not HEU or plutonium. Cesium isn’t impossible to come by. If this is some plot to suck us into war with Iran, the fact that we still don’t have direct evidence of bomb-grade material is comforting.”

“That what your analysts think? That this is a hoax?”

“No, sir. The agency now judges that this is a genuine plot. Eighty percent certainty.”

“Just like Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction?” Donna Green said.

Hebley ignored her. “Sir. If I may speak frankly. You put me at Langley because you felt it was ungovernable and unaccountable. From what I’ve seen, a lot of that’s true. Three case officers tell four different stories about an op, and they’re all lying. They spend their whole lives using other people. I mean, at least the Marines shoot you in the face.”

The President’s face tightened, and Hebley saw he’d overstepped. Only people who’d known him for decades could treat him as a human being. Everyone else served the office, not the man.

“The reason I mention all this is that I don’t want you to think I’m naïve. The CIA’s a snake pit. But what I’m seeing now transcends turf wars. Everyone’s trying to figure this out, why we can’t get SIGINT confirmation, why the Brits and the Mossad don’t know anything. Our best guess is that the Iranians know the risks they’re running, and that knowledge of this program is limited to a small number of senior regime officials. We think only a dozen people may really know what’s going on, including only a couple of the top scientists. Everyone else, in the dark.”

“Would they compartmentalize that way—”

“Think about our own nuclear program during World War Two, we had a great advantage, huge country, we didn’t have to worry about satellites or spy planes. Even so, we basically imprisoned our own physicists until the war was done. The Iranians know we’re looking at everything they do. The idea that the Rev Guard would go out of its way to try to create deniability here makes sense.”

“And the fact that over the last few months they’ve been so positive in public, opened negotiations?”

“Putting Mathers aside, and the ship. Our analysts believe, and I agree, that what they say in public, whether it’s at the UN or on Twitter or wherever, doesn’t mean anything. Either they let us into their plants or they don’t. And they’re still not.”

“So you believe they’re cynical enough to have agreed to negotiate just to buy time for this scheme?”

“Sir, in the 1980s, they sent close to a million of their own men to die in a war. I don’t think they’d have a problem lying to the United States.”

“But we have this source,” Green said. “This magic source. If we didn’t have him, we’d blame the embassy bombings and Veder on al-Qaeda. We wouldn’t even know about the cesium. We’d be whistling our way over a cliff like everyone else.”

“Mathers is real.”

“I wish I shared your conviction.”

“We know they have a program. Mathers has simply told us it’s further along than we thought.”

“He’s done more than that, General. He’s suggested a very specific threat. The kind that starts a war. And, correct me if I’m wrong, it’s not just that we don’t have any confirmation of this, none of our allies have picked anything up, either—”

“The Mossad has warned something like this is a possibility.”

“That was war-game bull out of Tel Aviv. Not relevant.”

Hebley stared at Donna Green. In Sangin, Afghanistan, a full-bird Marine colonel had once thrown up during a briefing under the weight of that stare. The guy had been running sick, but even so. Green didn’t throw up. Green stared right back.

“You are correct,” Hebley finally said. “We’ve got no other confirmation.”

“Thank you.”

“I thought you had bigger balls than this, Donna. If we’re going to war, let’s do it before they put the nuke on our soil—”

“Nothing’s happening today,” the President said. “I agree with Donna. We need more than this before I’ll consider military action.”

“Scott, there’s a plane waiting for you at Andrews,” Green said. “Have somebody pick up your go-bag, make sure it’s got a fresh suit. You’re going to Paris, to see Hamad Assefi.” The Iranian ambassador.

“He knows I’m coming?”

“Not yet,” Green said. “The DGSE can set it up, yes?”

“Probably. We’re going to have to tell them something.”

“Tell them we’ve found that the Iranian nuclear program is more advanced than we believed. We need to start raising the curtain on this anyway.”

“You’re going to tell Assefi we know what they’re doing,” the President said. “Without specifics. Just that they’re on a very dangerous path.”

“I doubt he’ll know anything.”

“That’s why we want you to talk to him,” Donna said. “If the mullahs and the Rev Guard have made an end run here, let’s at least make sure the rational folks know.”

Hebley feared the mission would be a waste of time at best, but he saw the President was done hearing objections from him on this day.

“Good luck, Scott.”

Hebley offered the President his crispest salute and received the briefest of nods in return. He couldn’t get out the door fast enough. Least now he knew how that colonel in Sangin felt.

22

Wells was gone.

Twenty-four hours since he’d last checked in. He hadn’t called or emailed. He hadn’t sent a telegraph or a semaphore or a pigeon. He’d dissolved like a spoonful of sugar in a hot cuppa tea. Shafer wanted to believe he was in the weeds, about to take the photo of Glenn Mason that would turn everything around. But Wells had said the day before that he was close. By now he would have gotten the shot, or realized he was chasing a false lead. Either way, he’d want to talk to Shafer. He had no reason to go silent. Ergo, he hadn’t gone silent by choice.

Shafer wanted to be surprised. In truth, he had expected this moment for a long time. Maybe as long as he’d known Wells. Certainly since Wells had left Exley. Adrenaline was a drug, and Wells was a junkie. Only Exley and Anne wanted him clean. Everyone else enabled him. Like all junkies, he chased bigger and bigger fixes. Now he’d put himself in so much danger that all his skills couldn’t save him—

His phone buzzed. The burner handset reserved specifically for Wells.

Shafer grabbed it. It slipped through his gristled hands, bounced off the floor, stopped buzzing. Shafer’s eyes filled with tears.

He was getting too old for this. Age hadn’t just taken his knees or his eyes. It had blunted his mind, made him a mawkish fool. Crying would do no one any good, least of all Wells. Shafer checked to be sure no one was outside his office. Then closed his fist, smacked himself in the forehead hard enough to hurt. He felt much better.

The phone buzzed again. He went to his knees, grabbed it like a prize pearl. “John.”

“Do I speak to Mr. Ellis?”

Not Wells. Not an American. “Ellis Shafer, yes.”

“Roger Bishop give me number. Say you pay me.”

“We’ll pay. You have him?”

“Not me.”

“Who are you?”

“My name Kemal. I drive him. From airport.”

Over the next fifteen minutes, Kemal detailed what he’d seen. He had locations and times but no details. He hadn’t written down the BMW’s plate.”Before he go, he tell me, wait for him at Taksim, so I do. Two hours. He don’t come.”

“Did you see the man he was after?”

“Not really, no.”

“Are you home, Kemal?” Late afternoon in Langley, so past midnight in Istanbul.

“My taxi my home.”

“If you say so. Find a Western Union, call me again. I’ll send you money.”

“Yes.”

“Be careful. These people are dangerous.”

“You think I don’t know?”

Shafer wondered if Mason had killed Wells. Most likely. If not, he was being kept alive for a specific reason, and it wasn’t his winning personality. Maybe Mason feared that if Wells was found dead in Istanbul, Shafer and Duto could convince the seventh floor that the connection Wells had chased was real. Right now Wells had been missing for barely twenty-four hours, not enough to matter. Kemal’s version of events proved only that Wells had shown lousy judgment, racing into a terrible neighborhood alone in the middle of the night.

Shafer called Duto, told him what Kemal had said.

“Think our friends upstairs will care?”

“No.”

For the first time in his life, he and Duto agreed on everything.

“I’m going to Istanbul, Vinny.”

“By yourself.”

“Stake out the apartment.”

“You think you can do better than the best field guy ever.”

“They were waiting for him. They won’t be waiting for me.”

“They will catch you in five minutes, Ellis. If Wells is alive, he’ll get himself out of there. Your job is to make the connections. So make them.”

Duto was right. A fact that only made Shafer feel worse.

“Anything new from our adventure on the high seas?” Duto said.

“From what I hear, not much. Captain’s in isolation on the Reagan. They haven’t decided what to do with him. He’s sticking to his story. NEST has gone over the ship, hasn’t found anything else. Crew remembers a guy installing a television on the stopover in Dubai before this one, then the stereo system this time, so that backs up. But Sharif said leave him alone, so nobody talked to him. He did his thing and left. We’ve asked them about nationality, they don’t think Iranian, maybe Turkish, Lebanese. But none of them are Arab, they’re all Filipino or Pakistani, so what do they know? And plenty of Iranians are lighter-skinned.”

“Sharif—”

“No AQ connections as far as we can tell, doesn’t show up in the databases. Family’s in Lahore, we and the ISI have already sweated them. Not religious. Drinks, known to gamble, money problems, only two kids, only went to the mosque on Fridays.”

Shafer was bugged by something he’d just said, but he wasn’t sure what.

“Could be a cover.”

“Anything could be anything. Most of the time you back-trace a guy like this, the story you get is the truth. Meantime we’ve talked to the company that owns the Kara Six. Cover story is a drug interdict, we found a thousand kilos of heroin, we’re bringing the ship to Miami. According to what the captain said, he was supposed to drop the package and send the email for the pickup two days from now. So we have a little time. NSA’s chased the email and the number, but so far nothing.”

“We’re buying his story.”

“Until we get a better one.”

“This mysterious electronics installer, anything on him?”

“Good news is the Dubai port has three thousand surveillance cams. But ninety-five percent are live only. The entry gates have sixty-day recording, but only the customs warehouses, the refiners, and the fuel storage require a permit or a badge. Rest of it, show a passport, local ID, you’re in. The ships themselves are responsible for their own security, keeping out stowaways. Long story short, the guy could have driven up in a sedan, the television in the trunk, and we’d have no way of knowing who he is. But we have six case officers in Dubai looking. We’re trying to track the television and stereo equipment too, see if we can figure out who bought it.”

“Smart.”

“Yeah. But Dubai has huge used electronic markets so it may not go anywhere. Meantime, most of SOG is in Istanbul. No one’s told me explicitly, but I think we’ve decided if the source pops up again, we’re taking him.”

“It strike you these people are going to a lot of trouble to make sure we never see them, Ellis? Rev Guard officers have DI”—diplomatic immunity. “And even some of Quds Force.”

In other words, if the Iranians really were running this operation, why were they going to so much trouble to stay hidden? “You know what Hebley’ll say to that. That when you’re thinking about starting a war with the United States, you take extra precautions. He might even be right.”

They were silent for a while.

“You thought I was pigheaded when I ran the place,” Duto finally said.

“I think this is a ball that wants to roll. If that makes sense.”

“To be continued.” Meaning Duto understood what Shafer was saying, that the seventh floor wanted to believe in the story coming out of Istanbul. And that they should have the conversation when Shafer wasn’t at headquarters.

“I’ll let you know if I hear from Wells.”

“He’s fine, Ellis. Boy’s a survivor. When the apocalypse comes, it’ll be him and the cockroaches.”

Shafer knew that Duto was just soothing him, but he was desperate to believe.

“Reporting to you, King Rat.”

“Inshallah. Figure out who’s paying for this, Ellis, before we start dropping bombs.”

Shafer tried. He saw now that he faced the reverse of the typical detective’s problem. Instead of a deep pool of suspects, he had only a handful. But he had too few clues to eliminate them. He was stuck guessing, not analyzing. Again and again, he considered the agencies that might have the communications and money and operatives to run a false flag plot targeting the United States. The FSB. The Mossad. Maybe the DGSE. But he kept running aground on motive. Whatever country had done this hated Iran, but it was willing to risk its relationship with the United States.

Yet Shafer had the maddening feeling that he already knew the answer, that if he only twisted the kaleidoscope once more around, the pieces would skip into place. An Iranian exile group was out. They hated the regime, but they gossiped so much that they could barely sneak anyone over the border without the Guard hearing.

Reverse engineer. Find the piece that’s sticking out, doesn’t fit. Pull on that until the whole machine comes apart.

The timing. The Israeli embassy attacks were less than six months old. Before that, the source known as Mathers hadn’t existed, as far as the agency knew. Yet Glenn Mason had worked on this operation at least since he’d faked his own death close to four years ago. What had Mason been doing all that time?

Assuming Shafer and Wells and Duto weren’t crazy, this false flag was meant to stampede the United States into attacking Iran. To use American firepower to do what the plotters couldn’t. Maybe Mason and his group had spent those first two years trying to stop Iran directly, before realizing they couldn’t.

Shafer remembered now, a half-dozen or more assassinations in Europe and Asia, all related to the enrichment program, Iranian scientists and foreign nationals, too. None of the murders had been solved, as far as Shafer knew. They looked a lot like James Veder’s killing, professional, but not high-tech. No drones or remotely detonated bombs. Hands-on work. The world had naturally blamed Israel, the Mossad.

Shafer called Duto. “Remember, maybe three years ago, bunch of guys connected with the Iranian program got hit?”

“Sure.”

“You talk to Tel Aviv about that?” Home of the Mossad’s headquarters.

“Rudi always denied it.” Ari Rudin, known as Rudi, had run the Mossad for a decade before leaving for reasons similar to Duto’s. Elected leaders didn’t like their spy chiefs to be too powerful.

“You believed him?”

“There were a couple things that made me think he wasn’t lying. I didn’t see the Israelis killing EU nationals in Europe.”

“They’ve operated there before.”

“Against Arabs, yes.” The Mossad had famously carried out reprisal killings all over Europe against the Palestinian terrorists who assassinated the Israeli Olympic team. “And if they caught a European in Tehran, I don’t think they’d care. But the blowback from the EU if Israel got caught smoking a host-country national would be big. It’d have to be a very high-value target, I mean someone whom the Iranians couldn’t afford to lose. And none of these guys fell in that category. They were little fish.”

“So why risk it?”

“Correct. Plus Rudi said something else, too. I said, Okay, not you, who, then? He said, I don’t know, I don’t want to know. This is a mitzvah.”

“Mitzvah?” Mitzvah was a Hebrew word that meant good deed.

“What he said. From his point of view, it was scaring these Eurotrash helping Iran, plus if whoever was behind it went down, he wouldn’t have any blowback because the Mossad wasn’t involved.”

“But he didn’t tell you who.”

“Like I said, he insisted he didn’t know.”

“It would have to be privately run, though.”

“If it wasn’t him, and it wasn’t us, who else could it be?” Duto paused. “And you’re asking because you think maybe this is the same people?”

“Just guessing.”

“And nobody put it together because who’s going to connect anti-Iran assassinations from three years ago with an op that starts with hits on two Israeli embassies. Not bad. See, your boyfriend gets lost, you put that big brain in gear.”

“Heng dikh oyf a tsikershtrikl, vestu hobn a zisn toyt.” A Yiddish curse Shafer hadn’t heard since his childhood: Hang yourself with a sugar rope, you’ll have a sweet death.

“I love it when you go ethnic on me, Ellis—”

Shafer didn’t expect trouble getting a look at the files on the Iranian assassinations. As Duto had said, no one had connected them with the current crop of killings. He called Dave Hikett, the guy who had told him what had happened on the Kara Six. They’d served together in Warsaw in the late eighties. Hikett was now the deputy director of Counterproliferation, which theoretically oversaw the agency’s efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, but in reality spent most of its time stuck in turf battles with the Pakistani, Iranian, and North Korean desks. A couple months before, Hikett had told Shafer he was sick of the infighting, ready to retire. Hikett, Lucy Joyner, a couple guys in the DST — Shafer could count his real friends inside on one hand. Live too long, no one comes to your funeral.

“Ellis.”

“Dave. Question for you—”

“Now’s not a good time, Ellis. Lot going on. Call you back.”

“Dave—”

But Hikett was gone.

Everyone at Langley consented to being monitored on the house phones as a condition of employment. The unwritten rule was that the agency listened only for good reason. But Hikett had as much as told Shafer he was under surveillance.

Shafer wondered how much trouble he might be in. Plenty. He talked to Duto and Wells on burners, but those wouldn’t matter if they had his office bugged. He had revealed classified information to Duto twice today. The fact that Duto was a United States senator and former DCI would save Shafer from criminal prosecution, but not from losing his job, his pension, any connection with this place.

He had to admit Carcetti had warned him.

Shafer picked up the phone to call Hikett again, then stopped himself. He would only get the man in more trouble. Hikett lived on the Hill, a divorcé with two cats and a girlfriend Shafer had never met and suspected might not exist. Maybe he’d go by tonight and they’d figure out some place in Southeast to meet, somewhere where they’d stand out but the agency’s internal security guys would stand out even more. Or maybe Hikett just wanted to retire with his pension intact, and, even more important, his clearance, so he could work for Booz Allen for a couple hundred grand a year. In that case, he wouldn’t call at all.

Shafer believed in this lead. Hikett’s files would have police work and intel tips from a half-dozen countries. Forensic evidence. Maybe Mason had even let a surveillance camera take his photo. But Shafer wouldn’t be getting a look at those files tonight.

Shafer had tacked into headwinds for most of his career. This was different. He had assumed that Hebley and his inner circle had fallen hard for this Rev Guard source. It happened. Somebody walked in with great intelligence and was right a couple times, the questions just melted away.

Now for the first time, Shafer wondered whether someone on the seventh floor was actively aiding the conspiracy. A senior CIA official steering the United States into war. The idea was implausible at best. But no longer impossible.

If he couldn’t get a look at Hikett’s files, he’d find the answer somewhere else. He had the clues already. He just needed to see them. He put his face in his palms and closed his eyes and tried to see.

23

Two days now.

Or maybe not. Maybe one and a half. Maybe three. Time was elastic. Wells had no windows, no way of telling day from night. He could hear the faint hum of highway traffic through his bricked-up cell, but he didn’t recognize any pattern in the noise. The knockout drug hadn’t fully cleared yet. Smog pickled his mind, and his stomach felt tight and tender, like he’d swallowed a half-dozen golf balls. He suspected he’d been hit with a near-fatal dose of Rohypnol.

James Thompson would have appreciated the irony. Thompson, his old buddy from Dadaab. Now serving thirty-two years in a max-security federal prison in North Carolina for kidnapping and fraud. With his sentence shortened for good behavior, he’d be paroled at about sixty-five. Wells would have locked him up for life, but the decision hadn’t been his.

He expected his own sentence to be shorter but harsher. A few more days as an unperson in this unplace. A bullet in the back of the head. Then what? Probably they’d carve up his corpse, throw it in a trunk, dump it in the Black Sea. They weren’t sentimental, these people. Even through his haze he understood that much.

Good news was that his foot wasn’t broken. The swelling was coming down. He’d tested it, found it bore his weight. In another day or two, he expected to be able to run on it. If he could just get free.

At first he had thought his kidnappers let him live because they wanted to know who was helping him. He’d readied himself for torture. An episode in Beijing years before had shown Wells how much punishment rough guys could inflict even without electricity or knives or any other depravity. Pain broke everyone, and it broke most people quickly. Ironically, the best way to fight was not to imagine the agony ending, but instead to slow time, break it into the smallest fractions possible. A second. Then another. Anyone could stay quiet for a single second.

Sooner or later, that illusion crumbled. Getting a break from the agony became absolutely necessary. Wells planned to give up the tiniest fragments possible, lying along the way, forcing the torturers to unscramble the mess. He didn’t look forward to this game. It would end with his death. Along the way, the pain would be impossible to imagine, even as it happened. Yet he wasn’t exactly afraid, either. He would make them sweat for every bit of him.

Now Wells wondered if they planned to torture him at all. They’d stuffed him in a crude cell, eight feet square, twelve feet high. The room smelled faintly of tobacco. Maybe his guards were holed up nearby and smoking. Maybe the place had once been a cigarette warehouse. Turkey still exported cigarettes all over the world. A sixty-watt bulb on the ceiling provided the only light, and it never went off.

They had cuffed Wells’s right hand to a post in the wall with a four-foot chain. His toilet was a bucket. A surveillance camera was mounted over the door, a cheap fish-eye lens available at any electronics store, its red light steady.

Still, they were feeding him, a basket of pita bread and a liter of water twice a day. His legs were free. The cell was unheated, but they’d given him a blanket. He even had fresh underwear and shorts. Basic comforts, to create the illusion they cared about him, so he wouldn’t resist.

He hadn’t seen Mason or the woman who had drugged him. The only people who’d come into the cell were two guards. He always asked them the same questions: Where am I? When can I see Mason? They never answered. In other words, his captors were basically ignoring him. Not in a we’re-isolating-you-to-soften-you-up way. In a we’re-busy-and-don’t-have-time-for-you way.

The realization didn’t improve his mood. The only reason that they wouldn’t bother to ask him questions was if they already had the answers. They knew who he was, they knew he was working with Shafer, and probably Duto, too. And they knew he hadn’t found enough to stop them. Again, Wells wondered why they hadn’t shot him. If they didn’t need information, most likely they were holding him as leverage, a way to slow down Shafer and Duto. But they had to know that he would never ask Shafer to keep quiet. If they ordered him to do that, Wells would tell them to put him down like a dog instead.

Wells looked around the cell, noticing pipes on the ceiling he hadn’t seen before, flecked white paint and rusted iron. Maybe his body was finally breaking down the sedative. Minute by minute he felt sharper, more perceptive. He examined the room’s bricks for cracks or crevices, found none. The chain that held him was padlocked to a ring in the wall. He tugged on it, testing it. But it had been hammered in and had no give. He leaned against the wall and listened for anything that would give him the rhythm of the city. Distant diesel engines, what might have been a foghorn, a long, eerie sound. No voices.

He turned his attention to the handcuff, but the guards had locked it tight around his wrist. Theoretically, with enough motivation, a prisoner could “deglove” a cuff, using the metal itself to tear away flesh until he could pull it over the bones of his hand. But Wells couldn’t believe anyone had ever managed a real-world degloving, even if the alternative was dying in a locked cell. He imagined his wrist bloody and raw as he tore the cuff into his bones.

Did he have any tools at all? The bucket. Blue plastic, with a plastic handle, the kind kids used at the beach. His toilet. His captors emptied it every morning. Wells looked at it, wondered—

The door opened. Glenn Mason.

Medium height, his arms middle-aged and slack. His face strange. Wide and puffy, like someone had inflated a balloon under his skin. Like he’d overdosed on human growth hormone. Barry Bonds syndrome. His nose squarer and flatter than it had been. His eyes smaller in his face. Even his ears different. Wells saw why the face-recognition software had failed.

Mason wore a T-shirt, jeans, boots, and a Taser strapped on his belt. He stepped inside the cell but left the door open. “The famous John Wells. You can call me Duke.”

Duke. His fake name at the clinic.

“Aesthetic Beauty did you right.”

“You want me to admit it, John? Sure. Isn’t this where you tell me I can’t get away with it? That if I just tell you who’s behind all this, maybe you can cut me a deal?”

Wells lifted his cuffed right hand. “Not sure I’m in a position to make ultimatums.”

“Love to know how you found me in Thailand.”

“Luck. And a lot of time in Patpong.”

“I figured. Speaking of. I made that run strictly to shake you out. See how many guys you had with you. Didn’t think you could be stupid enough to follow me alone down that hill. I guess the folks at Langley who always said you were lucky, a cowboy, they were right?”

“You have nothing better to do than trash talk?”

Mason put a smartphone on the ground, kicked it gently to Wells.

“Turn it on.”

Wells did. On the home screen, a picture of Evan. Sitting on the bench in his San Diego State uniform, hands on his knees, leaning forward, desperate to get in the game. No.

“Taken two days ago. At Colorado State.”

How had they found him? Heather had given Evan his stepfather’s last name when he was only five. Very few people knew that Wells had ever been married, much less that he’d had a son.

“Played ten minutes, five points and an assist. Good-looking kid. Not surprising, your ex is pretty hot.”

This man, suffocating Wells with his own powerlessness, torture worse than any waterboarding. Making a joke of threatening his son. Wells wanted to tear the chain from the wall and throttle the man until his eyes bulged dead from his reconditioned face. But now more than ever he had to control his temper. Keep Mason happy. Make him believe his plan had worked. So he could get out of here. Then he would kill the man and everyone helping him. Burn their houses, salt their land, a plague of locusts. All of it.

“Leave them alone.” His voice even. “Whatever you want.”

Mason dug another phone from his pocket, held it up. The burner Wells used to call Shafer. The phone he’d been carrying when Mason’s team caught him.

“Your friend Shafer has called you a bunch of times. You need to talk to him, tell him you were wrong. Figure out what’s new on his side.”

“Glenn—”

“Duke.”

“Duke. I don’t want to argue, but he won’t buy it. It’ll make him more suspicious.”

“What, then?”

“How long have I been here?”

“Two, two and a half days.”

Afternoon in Istanbul, morning in D.C. A chance for Wells to get some sense of day and night. “I’ll tell him I thought I was close, but it was a trap, you guys set me up. I took off, a car hit me, knocked me out. I had no ID, and I just got let out of the hospital. I’m still after you, but you’ve gone to ground and the phone we used to track you isn’t working and you obviously know I’m here, so I have to start again.”

Mason hesitated. Like he wanted to clear the new plan with his boss. But didn’t want to have to tell Wells he wasn’t in charge. Again Wells thought of the woman who’d knocked him out. That cool, commanding voice.

“Okay. Tell him they took you to Kasımpasa hospital.”

“Kasımpasa.”

“And find out what he knows. If he has anything more.”

“He’ll probably want to check back tomorrow. You okay with that?”

“Tomorrow’s tomorrow. Send back that phone.”

Wells slid back the smartphone as Mason unlocked the burner, cued Shafer’s number. Wells didn’t ask how he’d beaten the passcode. Whoever was running this could afford a good tech team.

“You push the green button, do your thing. I see you try to call anyone else, I Tase you, take the phone. Then we kill your kid. I hear you tell Shafer anything but what we agreed on, I Tase you, take the phone. Then we kill your kid. You with me?”

Wells nodded. Mason unbelted the Taser, kicked the burner across the cell. Wells reached for it. Rehearsed what he’d say. This call he’d play completely straight. Buy time to figure a way out.

He pushed the button. One ring, then voice mail. Wells nearly hung up. Shafer always answered this phone. But maybe he was one step ahead, maybe he realized that Wells might be calling under duress and they would be better off not talking.

“Ellis. Sorry I haven’t called. Been stuck in the hospital. Mason set me up, I didn’t get the picture, a car took me. I was unconscious for a whole day, they held me for observation for one more. But I’m out now, and I need to talk. Call me.”

He hung up. The message seemed lame to him, but Mason seemed pleased. He waved his fingers, come hither. Wells tossed him the phone. “He’ll call back in not too long.”

“He knows you’re alive, he won’t freak, do anything stupid. You do the same.” Mason stepped into the hallway. “Like those drunk-driving public-service announcements. The life you save may be Evan’s.”

This guy couldn’t lay off. His girlfriend had told Wells he didn’t talk much, but maybe he’d dropped that persona, too, when he’d gotten his new face.

“See you soon.” Mason shut the door, leaving Wells by himself, nothing but his self-hatred for company.

Anne had been more right than she knew. How could he have imagined that being married or having kids was compatible with this life? Especially now that he didn’t work for the agency. He didn’t have the protections of a regular CIA officer. Or even an off-the-books operative, a so-called NOC, under nonofficial cover. The NOCs ran mostly on their own, but when missions went bad, at least they knew the agency would try to help. Not Wells. Shafer or Duto wouldn’t come for him. He would get out of this mess on his own or die. Either way, he would leave Anne behind, let her find a man who could love her as she deserved.

Then what? He didn’t know. If Mason and his people could make the connection, anyone could. Between him and Evan, Wells couldn’t see any solution to the problem. Maybe there was no solution. But before he could do anything about it, he had an even more basic problem to solve.

Escape.

24

Snatch-and-grab

Of a foreign national.

In a megalopolis.

Without the permission

Of the host country.

Brian Taylor ran the sentences through his mind, an International Criminal Court haiku. Officially, the agency planned to “detain” Reza. No one wanted to say kidnap, abduct, or imprison. Extraordinary rendition was even worse, a phrase bagged and burned years before.

The risks of the plan were hard to overstate. What if they had to take Reza off a crowded street? How many Turks would see? How quickly would the police show? A clean grab wouldn’t end the potential for disaster. Reza might refuse to work with the agency afterward. Or the Iranians might be watching. Then Reza would be worse than dead after the agency kicked him loose.

Taylor wanted to object. Reza was his asset. But the choice wasn’t his anymore. The agency could no longer tolerate Reza’s anonymity. It had to know who he was, where he’d grown up, gone to school, why he had decided to betray his country, his history with the Guard, the names of his bosses. All the questions he had refused to answer.

It had to know if he was real.

And if Reza became so angry that he refused to talk? Even with Guantánamo off the table, the CIA had plenty of leverage. It could tell Reza that it would slip his name and photo to the Iranians if he didn’t cooperate. The Guard’s revenge would be swift and brutal, whether or not Reza worked for it.

But again Reza had confounded them. Since his late-night meeting with Taylor, he had vanished. Three SOG teams were searching. Martha Hunt had told Langley they were wasting their time. Istanbul was as big as New York City, and no one had an idea where Reza might be. The operatives should stay close to the consulate, wait for Reza to call. But they were bored with their hotel rooms. They wanted to feel useful.

Meantime, FBI had detached four specialists in missing-persons cases. NSA had sent a team of its own. In other words, even more guys in khakis were roaming around than usual. And no one had much to do. Taylor felt certain that despite their efforts, Reza would beat them. The man knew that they would have the dogs out, and he’d outquicked them three times already. Nothing for Taylor to do but keep his phone charged and wait.

The call came as he sat at his desk at 5:15 p.m., another gray day come and gone.

“Reza?”

“Seventy-four Gonca. Number six. In Bahçelievler.” A fast-growing, densely packed neighborhood northeast of the airport.

“It’s time to come in.”

“A present there. It speaks for itself. Bring a Geiger.”

“Did you check your account?” After the Kara Six intercept, the CIA had moved another three hundred thousand dollars into Reza’s UBS account. The money remained untouched.

Reza didn’t answer. Brian watched the little digital timer on the phone tick away… Forty-two, forty-three… Not long enough. Keep him talking. “What about your friend? Your family?”

“Pray for me, Brian. Even if neither of us believes in Allah.”

“You need our protection, Reza, you need—” But Taylor was talking to an empty line.

Hunt walked into his office. “NSA says he’s in Fatih, possibly on Vatan.”

Not good enough to find him, as they both knew. Vatan was a boulevard that ran through Fatih, a poor, densely packed neighborhood in the Old City. If Reza was in a taxi, he could step out and vanish into Fatih’s back alleys. If he was walking, he could get on a tram. If he was driving himself, he would reach the inner ring highway in minutes. He would be long gone before the first operative reached Vatan.

“I’m going to Bahçelievler,” Taylor said.

“Trap.”

“I’m going.”

“I’ll get two detectors.”

She was already walking to the locked closet where the station kept its pager-sized radiation detectors. Taylor stuffed his pistol in his waistband holster. “You really do care,” he shouted down the hall.

“Keep telling yourself that.”

Without debate, they took a taxi directly from the front consulate gate. Not great tradecraft — terrible tradecraft, in fact. But they both wanted to get there as fast as possible. They barely spoke along the way. Taylor didn’t think he’d ever see Reza again. Either the man was one of the greatest sources in the agency’s history or a dangerous fraud. Taylor wanted to believe, but he was losing confidence. More cesium wouldn’t convince anyone, either. According to the Counterproliferation desk, that stuff was available. Hard to get, but not impossible.

Seventy-four Gonca stood in the center of a row of identical six-story apartment buildings, concrete and painted a bright lemon yellow, with sliding glass doors that opened onto small smoking balconies.

Taylor pulled on gloves and Hunt did the same. He reached for his pistol, but she tapped his arm. “Not yet. Too many kids.” She took an autopick from her pocket. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” Taylor said, and wished he hadn’t.

Ten seconds later, they were inside. The first floor smelled of dinner, lamb with plenty of garlic. The building had two apartments per floor. Number six was on the right side of the third floor. Its front window had been dark from the street, Taylor remembered. He didn’t see any light under the door.

He motioned Hunt to the left side of the door and pulled his pistol. He pointed to the lock: You pick, I’ll open. He half expected that Reza would have doped the lock with Krazy Glue, one last hurdle. Instead it clicked smoothly. Taylor held the pistol low in his right hand, reached for the knob with his left. Reza could easily have rigged a shotgun behind the door. If Taylor had been alone, he might have hesitated. But not with Hunt looking him over with her ice-blue eyes. He grabbed the knob, shoved open the door, ducked inside.

No shotgun.

Behind him, Hunt closed the door. They left the lights off, let their eyes adjust to the light trickling through the front window. The apartment had one big front room, a combination living area and galley kitchen. It was sparsely furnished, only a futon and a coffee table. It gave off a distinct hotel feeling.

Hunt pointed to the radiation detector on her belt. The single light on the side was a steady green, meaning that it wasn’t picking up emissions. Yellow for alpha, orange for beta, red for gamma. Red meant get out.

Hunt pulled open the door beside the kitchen. Behind it, a corridor ran past two more doors, ended at a third. Hunt went to the end. Taylor took the first door on the right, found an empty room. Not even a bed. In the closet, a prayer rug that looked like it had never been used. Maybe it had come with the place.

Behind the second door, a narrow bathroom, basic toiletries, an unopened pack of L&M cigarettes under the sink. Reza’s brand. Taylor picked them up with his gloved hands, put them in his jacket. The techs would test everything for prints, though Taylor couldn’t imagine Reza making that mistake. All along, the radiation detector stayed green. He walked out of the bathroom just as Hunt emerged from the third door, shaking her head.

Back in the kitchen, Taylor pulled open the cabinets. Cooking oil, rice, bags of pita bread. A Quran tucked next to a spice rack. And a tall brown bottle of Amarula, a milky South African liqueur, instantly recognizable by the elephant on its label. An old girlfriend of Taylor’s had liked the stuff. Strange to see it here. He put it on the counter.

In the living area, Hunt checked under the futon’s cushions. Her BlackBerry buzzed. “SOG got to Vatan. Nothing. Your friend’s jerking us around.”

But Taylor didn’t think so. Reza hadn’t lied to him. Played him endlessly, but never lied. He tried the refrigerator, found it empty aside from a pomegranate and two water bottles. In the freezer, a frozen rack of lamb angled against the back wall. Taylor started to close the door. Then stopped. He pushed the lamb aside. He found a letter-sized envelope. Behind that, a plastic-wrapped tube, four inches tall, an inch-plus around, the size of a stack of half-dollars. He pulled the tube out with his fingertips, gingerly, like he was afraid of freezer burn—

His detector alerted. A steady beeping, the light flashing yellow. Alpha. Safe to hold, at least that’s what the Counterproliferation guys had told them in their briefing. Which had lasted all of forty-five minutes.

“Martha.” He held up his detector. Hunt joined him. For a moment, they stood stupidly in front of the open freezer door, looking at the tube like a couple of stoners trying to figure out which ice cream to eat next.

“Whatever it is, let’s get it back to the station.” He dropped the tube and envelope in her purse and reached for the Amarula.

He held up the bottle. A chunk of glass in the base had been cut out, replaced with a brown plastic plug. A dime-sized slot on the plug’s face allowed it to be tightened or loosened. Taylor pulled the plastic-wrapped cylinder out of Hunt’s purse, checked it against the hole. The cylinder was slightly smaller.

“Unscrew it, pour out some booze, drop the thing in,” Hunt said.

“Thing being the technical term.”

“But won’t the weight be wrong? The density?”

“Pack the bottle in a suitcase, who’s checking? Especially because the bottle and whatever’s inside must be enough to hide the radiation. Then you fly anywhere. One bottle of liqueur, no customs agent in the world will care.”

“How did you know?”

“Reza’s weird, but Amarula didn’t make sense even for him.” He checked the other cabinets, just to be sure. Nothing else.

Hunt spun a finger in the air. Time. Taylor put the Amarula bottle in a plastic bag, took one last look at the kitchen, and followed her out, keeping his pistol unholstered. No chances now.

At the consulate, they went for the coms center, ignoring the questions from the SOG team leader and everyone else. In what now seemed like a major mistake, a nuclear emergency team hadn’t been sent to Istanbul. The Air Force was sending radiation experts from its base at Incirlik, but they would need hours to arrive. Hunt had already asked the Turkish Interior Ministry if police could find the apartment’s owner, interview everyone in the building. As a cover story, she said the FBI had connected the apartment to an al-Qaeda operative in Chicago.

Meantime, the DOE nuke experts had warned them not to unwrap the tube. Taylor figured that was one piece of advice they wouldn’t follow. He pulled the Amarula bottle from the bag. “Drink?”

“Funny.” Hunt extracted the plastic-wrapped tube and the envelope from her purse, slid him the envelope. “This first.”

Inside, two sheets of paper. First, a handwritten itinerary. Turkish Airlines from Istanbul to Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kinshasa to Luanda, Angola, on TAAG, Angola’s national airline. Then Luanda to Havana, again on TAAG. Several dates were listed for each flight.

“I hope he’s flying first class,” Hunt said.

“Only airport on that list that would have radiation-detection equipment is Atatürk. He gets out of here, he’s good.”

“So he lands in Havana. Ninety miles from Key West. Then what?”

“Goes out into the Gulf and leaves it for whoever made the pickup from the Kara Six. Same way, a homing device.”

“Or he just hands it off, ship to ship.” Reza could easily find a Cuban fishing crew to help make the transfer for a few thousand dinero. “Or even brings it to Florida himself.”

“Not clear from this if he actually made the reservations,” Taylor said.

“That is a checkable fact. What else does he have for us?”

Taylor looked over the second page:

He slid the letter to Hunt.

“A smiley face? He’s giving us a kilogram of what he says is weapons-grade uranium and running with the hellhounds after him, and he throws in a smiley face.”

“That’s him. His way of taking credit for the interdiction. I wish you could have met him.”

“Khodafez?”

“Good-bye.”

“He must know we’ll do anything to find him.”

“How’s that been working out for us?”

“I need to call Langley,” she said. “But first things first. One-point-three kilos is about three pounds. How much HEU in a bomb?” she said.

“More than this.”

They both knew the stuff couldn’t blow up just sitting on the table. No doubt it was safer than regular explosive. But that truth couldn’t close the pit in Taylor’s stomach. They were looking at the seed of a million nightmares.

She fished through her purse, came out with a Swiss Army knife. “Should we?”

“A Swiss Army knife? Thought you were cooler than that.”

“My ex-boyfriend gave it to me.”

Taylor wondered if he was hearing things, or if she had just put a not-so-subtle emphasis on ex. If this piece of metal really was what Reza said, the world had moved much closer to nuclear midnight. But if he’d impressed Hunt today, the news wasn’t all bad.

He reached for the knife.

25

The Oval Office had six visitors this time. The Four Horsemen. The National Security Advisor. And James Shaham, director of the Global Security and Nonproliferation Program at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee. Shaham was a nuclear physicist from his square wire-framed glasses to his scuffed black oxfords. He was there for a technical briefing, but he was suffering a severe case of OOFS — Oval Office Fright Syndrome. His face was slick with sweat, and he squeezed his hands together so tightly the President worried he would break a finger.

“When you’re ready, Dr. Shaham.”

Shaham untwisted his hands long enough to mop his forehead. A cloud of white flakes snowed out of his curly gray hair. “Little nervous, sir.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” The President smiled and Shaham seemed to relax.

“The situation, Mr. President. Seven hours ago, a CIA team delivered an ingot of one-point-three kilograms of uranium to Oak Ridge for review. The agency reported this material is believed to be a product of the Iranian nuclear program and was recovered in Turkey. I have no further details on where or how it was found. For my purposes, those facts are largely irrelevant. A preliminary on-site analysis of the ingot found it to be weapons-grade enriched uranium, approximately ninety-four percent U-235. Our task was to confirm the analysis, which we did, and then to match the ingot to known repositories of fissile material. Meaning, did it come from a national stockpile, whether ours, Russia’s, or another country’s.”

So far Shaham hadn’t said anything that the President and everyone else in the room didn’t already know. “How does that matching work?”

“After the end of the Cold War, the major nuclear powers shared samples of their fissile material, highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium. The feeling was that if a piece like this turned up, everyone would want to know where it came from. The physical samples were sent to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to be assayed by scientists there. The data was then shared with the contributing countries. I assume you’re not interested in the technical details, but everyone’s HEU looks different. Impurities, enrichment levels, radioactive signature, levels of tertiary uranium isotopes. Plutonium has similar differences, though that’s not at issue in this case.”

“And every country with weapons has joined?”

“Except North Korea, sir. That includes Israel, even though it isn’t a declared power, as well as Pakistan after its first nuclear test.”

“Can we be sure they’re providing representative material?” Donna Green said.

“Excellent question, ma’am. We can’t. As a condition of joining, every country agrees to let IAEA inspectors sample their stockpiles every three years. Even so, it is possible that a country could try to fool the program by de-enriching and then re-enriching material. There might be some similarities with the existing samples, but our scientists can’t say for sure that they would prove a match. That’s an interesting technical question we’re looking at right now. But this material, as best we can tell, is fresh. That is to say, it doesn’t share a signature with any existing samples.”

The room was silent. The President had known this, too. The answer had come back a couple hours before. But hearing Shaham saying it was a different matter. He came off as the opposite of a warmonger. Everything about him broadcast precision, caution, professionalism.

“Two hours ago, we put out a Yellow Alert through IAEA. That means we’re asking the other nuclear powers to check their stockpiles. We don’t have to explain why. Just, as a courtesy, please let us know if you’ve had significant losses since your last report. We’ll get answers in the next forty-eight hours, but I’m not optimistic. A loss of this size would surely have been reported already.”

“But you can’t say for sure that the material’s Iranian,” Green said.

“That’s correct, ma’am. We don’t have an Iranian sample. We’re not even sure the Iranians have reached this level of enrichment. All I can tell you for certain is that we haven’t seen material like this ingot before.”

“Could a private group have done this?” Hebley said.

“General, I never say never to anything except perpetual-motion machines. But enriching a kilogram-plus of uranium to this level requires large facilities that can’t be hidden. Hundreds of scientists. Billions of dollars — tens of billions, if they’re going to be put underground.”

“So no?”

“It’s very unlikely.”

“What about North Korea?” the President said.

“That’s a possibility, but we believe this grade of enrichment is beyond them.”

“Next question. How close is this to a bomb?”

“Depends on the size of the bomb, and the skill of the scientists putting it together. Our own scientists can build a one-kiloton nuclear bomb with two and a half kilograms of HEU.”

“That’s only two of these.”

“Correct, sir. A bomb that size is tiny by nuclear standards, the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT. Fifty tractor-trailer loads. During the Cold War, we regularly detonated bombs with ten thousand times as much power. Even so, a one-kiloton bomb explosion in midtown Manhattan would kill tens of thousands of people. More realistically, assuming a cruder bomb design, a bomb like that would require four to seven kilos of HEU. A bomb ten times as big, ten kilotons, would require six to twelve kilos. That’s Hiroshima-sized. It means a half-square-mile hole.”

“Five of these ingots could do that?”

“Between five and ten, sir.”

“And how hard is it to build the actual bomb?”

“Compared to enriching the uranium, easy. The basic designs have been public for decades. An engineer and a machinist could put one together in a couple weeks, especially if they had access to the right explosives.”

The right explosives. Shaham didn’t know about the Semtex that Commander Ivory had found on the Kara Six, but everyone else in the room did.

“Thank you, Dr. Shaham,” the President said. “If we have any questions—”

“Mr. President, sir. If I might make one last comment.”

No one interrupted the President in this room. He cleared his throat, and Shaham suddenly took great interest in his shoes.

“Sorry, sir.”

“Go ahead.”

“I would only point out that an ingot of this quality, this, whoever did this, it’s not their first time at the rodeo.”

“You say this from personal experience?” the President said. James Shaham made a singularly unlikely cowboy.

If Shaham knew he was being mocked, he didn’t reveal it. “This feels like they’ve had several runs. Four or five at least.”

“So what you’re telling us is that there’s more HEU out there.”

“I don’t know how to define out there, sir, but produced. Of course, I could be wrong, sir. This is based on instinct, not evidence. I always prefer evidence.”

“Thank you, Doctor. If you wouldn’t mind waiting outside.”

Shaham walked out on shaky legs.

As the door shut behind him, Green murmured, “Rawhide.” Nothing more. The report hadn’t put anyone in a joking mood.

The President looked at Hebley. “General. Let’s save Shaham for a minute. I haven’t seen you since your trip to Paris. I’d like to hear firsthand what you thought about Assefi.” The Iranian ambassador to France.

“Sir. These conversations are always difficult. With the translators present. But as best as I could tell, he had no idea what I was talking about. He asked me more than once for more information. It was a short conversation, no more than twenty minutes.”

“What did you think of him personally?”

“Assefi’s polished. No beard. Hand-tailored suit. More Persian, less Iranian, is how I’d put it. Best we can tell, they figure they need a couple guys like him to give the Europeans cover to keep doing business with them. As I said, he seemed perplexed.”

“Did that change your overall view of the situation?”

“No, sir. Both when I was at the Pentagon and now, I believed that the Iran power structure is highly concentrated. It’s hard for us to understand. We have so many different constituencies, power is genuinely diffuse. You, Congress, lobbying groups, Pentagon bureaucracies, multinationals, et cetera. In Iran, Afghanistan, I saw it up close, in the end a handful of people make the decisions. Assefi, Rouhani, they’re useful as front men, doesn’t mean they know what’s really happening, much less can change it.” Rouhani was Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran.

“So how would you reach the men who can?”

“We need to get their attention. We’ve seen it again and again, especially since Syria, these regimes believe we’re not going to act. They think they can bluff us.”

“Just to review.” The President tented his hands together. “We have an unknown source of weapons-grade uranium. The man who tipped us, the agent you called Mathers, supposedly a Revolutionary Guard colonel, he’s disappeared.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We don’t have any independent corroboration. No signals intelligence, no human source, nothing from our allies. Nothing. We don’t even know this man’s real name. Nor do we have a photo.”

“That’s correct, sir.”

“But this source has provided us with four major pieces of intelligence, and they’ve all proven correct. Including, today, bomb-grade uranium that our own experts say doesn’t seem to have come from any known nuclear program.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mr. President.” This from Jake Mangiola, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “If I may. The Iranians can easily allay our suspicions if they let us inspect Natanz and the other plants.”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” the President said drily. Mangiola flushed. “Just so you know, tomorrow morning Donna is going to call Rouhani to see if he wants to talk to me directly. If he will, I’m going to tell him that we have direct evidence that his government is trying to move nuclear material to American soil, and he must allow the United States directly to inspect his enrichment plants. I have to try.” The President paused. “Assuming the Iranians choose not to pull down their pants for us, what do you have for me, Jake?”

For the next twenty-five minutes, Mangiola and Kenneth Belk, the Secretary of Defense, offered a menu of choices with steadily increasing casualty counts, from cyberattacks to missile strikes on enrichment plants to a sustained bombing campaign against military and even civilian targets. The President remained impassive throughout, hidden behind his hands.

“We’re presuming for now that a full-scale invasion is off the table, though the planners have spent some time on that, too,” Belk finally said.

The President pushed his chair away from his desk. He wanted a cigarette, but he wouldn’t let these generals see him smoke. Smoking was weakness.

The silence in the room stretched.

“No,” the President finally said. “None of it’s right. What do we have? Three pounds of uranium.”

“It came from somewhere,” Hebley said.

“I agree. I’ll even buy it’s Iranian. But we have to start with something that tells the world this is a crisis without killing a lot of people. I want awe, not shock. Nobody’s forgotten Iraq, WMD. I want room to escalate. A lot of room.”

“What about a blockade?”

“I don’t mean to joke,” the President said, “but it sounds so Cuban Missile Crisis. The cyber stuff is worse. I will destroy your Internet. I know it’s real, but it seems silly. I want something they’ll see in Tehran.”

“Like a drone strike,” Belk said.

“Except the opposite,” Green said. “Drone drops one bomb, kills a bunch of people.” She leaned forward, hands on her skirt. “But maybe—” She broke off.

“Donna?” the President said.

“I might have something.”

26

In 1971, a psychology professor at Stanford University chose seventy-five students to play prisoners or guards in a mock jail in a campus basement. By the second day, the guards were spraying prisoners with fire extinguishers, keeping them naked, locking them in closets. The experiment was supposed to last two weeks, but the abuse became so severe that the professor ended it after six days. More than forty years later, the Stanford Prison Experiment remained a milestone, proof that power corrupted.

But Wells saw a second moral, one more relevant to him at this moment. After a single day, the amateur guards at Stanford had defined prisoners as defiant or compliant. They focused on the troublemakers and ignored the rest. Full-time corrections officers never let down their guard, even around supposedly model prisoners. But the men watching Wells were soldiers-turned-mercenaries, not jailers. They knew Wells was dangerous. But he’d given them no reason to mistrust them. He hadn’t resisted in any way. On the contrary, he’d followed their orders without complaint.

The guards still took plenty of precautions. They made him face the wall when they entered the cell, so they could check the cuff on his right hand. They’d never unlocked him. And they never brought firearms into the cell. Instead, they wore Tasers, single-shot stun guns. Even if Wells could grab a Taser, he could disable only one guard. The backup would disarm him.

But — even after only six days — the guards had become slightly less vigilant. They put food directly in front of Wells. They came within arm’s reach when they took his waste bucket. Most important, they no longer watched him in pairs. A single guard entered, leaving the door open, his buddy down the hall. Sloppy. Lazy.

Wells would make them pay.

The day before, Mason had come back. “Why did Shafer stop calling?”

Wells shook his head.

“He’s gone to ground. You signaled him.”

“You heard the message I left. It sound like code?”

“Tell me how you got involved with this.”

Wells didn’t argue. He wanted to keep Mason happy, and he suspected Mason already knew most of the story. He explained, skipping only his trip to Panama. Montoya and Singh would have to look out for themselves. Sophia Ramos was innocent.

Mason didn’t look surprised at anything Wells said. “Langley help?” he said.

“Not as far as I saw.”

“Seventh floor didn’t want to hear.”

“I wasn’t there, but Shafer said they actively pushed back. I had to guess, I’d say Shafer’s figured out you grabbed me, decided his best play is laying low. That with the juice you have at Langley, he can’t stop this, and if he tries, he’ll only get me killed.”

“From what I know, that’s not Shafer’s style. Or yours.”

So Mason wasn’t even bothering to deny that the group he worked for had some connection inside. Wells decided to let the thread lie. Better if Mason didn’t realize the importance of what he’d admitted.

“Guards tell me you’ve been a good boy,” Mason said.

“I just want my family safe. It’s not about me anymore.” Wells knew they both understood the implication.

Mason dug Wells’s burner phone from his pocket. “So let Shafer know he’s doing the right thing. Elliptical. Obviously, don’t say ‘hostage.’ Nothing like that. Nothing he can take to anyone.”

“Your theory is correct, something like that.”

“Ad-lib it. I trust you. Circumstances being what they are.” Mason dialed, slid Wells the phone.

The call went straight to voice mail. “Ellis. Just want you to know the target’s practically in my sights. Stay cool, keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll handle it. Talk soon.” Wells clicked off, tossed Mason the burner.

“Just what the doctor ordered.”

“Don’t suppose you want to explain what this is really about.” Since I’m dead anyway.

Mason shook his head.

“Or should we call your boss? Ask her if you’re allowed to talk?”

Mason’s silicone lips tightened, all the answer Wells needed. “It’s about the truth, John — you don’t mind if I call you John? Doing what we should have done already.”

“From over here, it looks like tricking the United States into war. Killing a station chief.”

“Tell me you’ve never shot an American.”

But of course Wells couldn’t.

“You knew the whole story, you might even help. Too bad.” Mason walked out.

Mason had the swagger of Usain Bolt three strides from the finish line. Wells knew his own sell-by date was close. For now, the scales still tilted in favor of keeping him alive, leverage to keep Shafer quiet. But Mason or whoever was in charge would decide soon enough Wells was more trouble than he was worth.

So. Time to go. Or die trying.

Wells had to trust that if he failed, they wouldn’t hurt Evan. He didn’t see why they would. Dead, Wells was no threat. Evan would be in greater danger in the short run if Wells escaped. Soon as he got free, Wells would call Shafer, have him ask the FBI to cover Evan and Heather and Anne.

He spent the first part of the night putting together his plan, the second half crafting the weapon he needed. He had learned the rhythm of his captivity, could distinguish day from night. He had seen only the two guards, one in his late twenties, the other close to forty. He doubted there were others. Anyone else who was here would have given in to the temptation to look him over. The older guard was in charge. The younger did the scut work, removing his slop bucket each morning for cleaning.

They looked in on him four times a day, every six hours. The younger guard brought him breakfast and dinner. The older checked Wells at lunch and in the late evening, around midnight. Otherwise they left him alone, his cell door deadbolted from the outside. Theoretically, they could be watching him constantly through the spy cam. Wells guessed it fed a laptop nearby, wherever they lived and slept. He doubted they bothered. The chain binding Wells was so short that he could take only a single step in any direction. Watching him in here would be nearly as boring as being him.

With no toilet, and the bucket washed only once a day, the cell smelled fierce by the time the younger guard arrived each morning. They hadn’t allowed Wells to shower or shave. He had toilet paper and a few wet wipes, but he couldn’t imagine how he smelled and looked. Even in Afghanistan, he’d never felt as filthy as he did now, with only stale air and flies for company. He wasn’t sure how the flies got in, but they did.

On the other side of the bricks, the highway noise picked up. Wells hadn’t slept, but he felt stronger than he had in years. This time he wasn’t facing a raggedy Somali militia, or a Delta sniper who’d snapped after too many tours. Mason was a traitor. And Mason had threatened his son.

The Quran’s first verse flashed through Wells:

He didn’t know how to find Mecca in here, so he decided to face the door, his own mihrab. He closed his eyes, knelt, offered the regular dawn prayer. When he was done, he raised his head and imagined Anne, in North Conway, her deadline to him irrelevant now. He hoped she was sleeping peacefully. Not thinking of him. She’d made the right choice. And he knew what she’d say to him now, if she saw him here. Nothing from the Quran. Four words. Her state’s motto. Taken from a letter a Revolutionary War general had written in 1809:

The slop bucket was between his legs. Wells wrinkled his nose against the smell, pushed down his shorts, crouched over it. In case anyone peeked on the monitor before coming to check on him. In this unpromising but necessary posture, he waited for dawn.

The footsteps came minutes later. The deadbolt popped back. The door creaked open. Still squatting above the bucket, Wells leaned forward to cover himself. The young jailer stood in the doorway. He was wiry, ropy muscles, no fat at all. Nearly as tall as Wells. Like a tennis player. Wells imagined he’d have tennis-quick reflexes, too. He moved on the balls of his feet. The Taser rested on his right hip. Wells would have to move decisively, without hesitation, to have any hope of surprising him.

“Good morning.” His voice was low, marbly. Eastern European. He frowned as he realized he’d interrupted Wells over the bucket.

“Stomachache.”

The jailer stepped back into the hallway, locked the door. He returned with toilet paper and a bottle of water. By now Wells had his shorts up. The guard tossed him the roll and the bottle. Good. Already he thought of Wells as sick. Weak. Walking in on a stranger on the toilet was inevitably distracting. Most important, Wells had a reason that the bucket was at his feet instead of its usual spot in the middle of the cell.

“Thank you.” Wells cleaned himself as best he could, tossed the paper in the bucket.

The guard twirled his finger. Wells faced the wall, pressed his left palm against the bricks, lifted his right arm out and away. The guard came wide to his right side and tugged hard on the chain that held the handcuff. Wells grunted as the steel bit his wrist.

The guard stepped away. “Turn.”

Wells turned around, facing out.

“Sick.”

“No, I’m fine.” But Wells knew he didn’t look fine, or smell fine. Not after six days in this room and twenty-four hours without sleep. He nudged the bucket with his toe. “Please, can you clean it—”

The guard stepped toward Wells, reached down for the bucket, pulled it up—

And the filthy mixture inside poured out the bottom. The guard looked down in shock as the stuff cascaded around his shoes—

Wells wrapped his left arm around the man’s waist, hugged him close. With his right hand, Wells reached into his shorts and pulled the five-inch pie-shaped piece of plastic that he had broken from the base of the bucket. He had spent hours whittling the plastic against his handcuffs, making a homemade shiv, its sides letter-opener sharp. The four-foot chain gave Wells room to drive his right arm forward. The guard tried to spin out, but Wells held him firm and forced the knife into him, above the hipbone, aiming for the liver. The plastic blade didn’t cut as smoothly as a real knife, but the guy’s skinny frame left him unprotected. Wells sawed through skin and muscle until he reached the viscera underneath.

The guard screamed. Wells shoved in the blade as far as he could, then pulled it out. Bright red blood followed. The guard reached for the Taser on his belt. Wells let go of the knife, wrapped his right hand around the guard’s head. He drove forward with the crown of his skull and connected with the guard’s forehead, bone on bone. The world went white. But Wells stayed upright and conscious as the guard moaned and collapsed at his feet.

Wells grunted, breathed deep against the pain. At his feet the guard rustled, semiconscious. Wells turned the man’s head so the back of his skull lay against the floor. He lifted his heel and brought it down on the small bones of the man’s throat, firm, driving through, crushing his windpipe. A killing strike. The guard thrashed hopelessly.

Footsteps pounded down the corridor outside. Wells reached for the Taser. He came up with it as the second guard, the older man, arrived in the doorway, shouting. The guard turned and raised his pistol. Wells aimed the Taser for his chest and pulled the trigger.

Twin black wires exploded from the Taser. Powered by compressed nitrogen, the wires covered the fifteen feet between Wells and the guard in a fraction of a second. When they made contact, the metal barbs at their tips cut through the guard’s T-shirt and into his skin, completing an electrical circuit that ran across his chest. Fifty thousand volts passed through him. He dropped the pistol and went to his knees, yelling.

The company that made Tasers had once claimed they were nonlethal. No more. After hundreds of deaths, Tasers now carried prominent warnings of their potential to kill. They worked by causing muscles to clench uncontrollably. Every muscle. Even the diaphragm. Pulling a Taser’s trigger produced a five-second shock, nineteen pulses per second of electricity. A five-second hit was painful but not hugely dangerous unless the person being shocked was already close to cardiac arrest. But what most people didn’t know was that Tasers would pump out electricity as long as the shooter held the trigger. They had no override. And until the shock ended, the person being Tased couldn’t breathe.

Wells didn’t let go.

The next three minutes were the worst of his life. But he knew if he stopped, the guard would pull off the barbs. He would be free, with Wells defenseless, still locked to the wall. Wells couldn’t even stop at leaving the man unconscious, because he didn’t know how long he would need to get the cuff off his wrist.

For sixty seconds, the guard shrieked. Then the pain and fury on his face turned into empty panic. His mouth fell open. His face reddened. A cyanotic blue crept into his skin. His hands trembled, and the twitch spread up his arms. His tongue lolled. A faint white froth cupped his lips. He toppled forward, landed face-first against the concrete floor of the cell. Blood poured from his shattered nose and pooled around the twin wires of the Taser. Yet the barbs didn’t lose their grip. The electricity still flowed.

The noises coming from him faded to a low grunt. His eyes rolled back and the shaking in his arms and hands slowed until only a single finger twitched. The middle finger, a coincidence, surely. The puddle of blood lapped toward Wells like a poisonous lake overflowing its banks. It stained the man’s face, coated his tongue.

Wells couldn’t watch anymore. He squeezed his eyes shut. He had killed so many men in so many ways, yet this death was both the most savage and the most cowardly. He felt like a child burning an ant under a magnifying glass. This was murder, not combat. As though the Taser was drawing its charge from what was left of his soul.

Still he squeezed the trigger. When he opened his eyes the guard wasn’t twitching anymore. Wells had added another corpse to his pile of sin. He held on another thirty seconds. When finally he did, the Taser fell from his hand and clattered on the cell floor like a cheap plastic toy. Wells wiped his hand across his mouth, whimpered, leaned against the wall.

He didn’t want to move. He wanted to close his eyes and imagine anything but this place. But then Mason would arrive, and Wells would have murdered two men for less than nothing. The thought broke his stasis. He shook his head, quickly, almost a spasm, like he was cleaning an Etch A Sketch.

He had killed the guards knowing that he still didn’t have a plan for what came next. He hoped the younger guard would be carrying something that would let him pop the handcuffs, a pocketknife or a pen. He’d learned the trick during his training at the Farm, and after realizing a couple years before that he’d forgotten it, he’d made a habit of practicing.

Wells squatted beside the dead man. And felt a key in his right front pocket. A handcuff key. Never argue with good luck. Seconds later, he was free. He wanted to run. He didn’t. Don’t move. Think. He looked like a mental patient. He’d be a target for any cop who saw him. He had no passport or visa, no identification at all. He couldn’t call the consulate for help. His name would ring alarms at Langley, and whoever was working with Mason would hear. Wells had to ensure the Turkish authorities ignored him until he found a safe route out of the country. He might be here awhile anyway. He wasn’t leaving until he knew Mason was dead.

So. Find a phone. Call Shafer, get his family protected. Then shower, shave, find clothes and shoes. The younger guard’s stuff should fit.

Wells went to the door, pulled down the security camera. If Mason had remote access to the feed, Wells would rather he see a blank screen and wonder what was happening than see a dead guard and know. Wells knelt next to the second guard, wetting his knees in blood. The dead man wore white briefs, a T-shirt, a fake Rolex. Wells eyed the time. Seven-fifteen. No reason for Mason or anyone else to show this early. He picked up the pistol and stepped into the hall, his legs stronger with each step.

He found himself at the end of a corridor maybe seventy-five feet long, naked bulbs overhead. The air stank of cigarettes, but even so, it felt cooler and fresher than his cell. After a few feet, the wall on his right ended. A railing replaced it, turning the hallway into a kind of catwalk, with doors on the left. Wells walked along, found himself looking down at a factory floor, empty except for a few scattered sewing machines. An abandoned textile factory. Poor countries made clothes. Turkey wasn’t poor anymore. This strip of rooms had no doubt belonged to management, watching over the paid-by-the-piece stitchers below.

A metal staircase at the end of the catwalk connected the floors. To the left, an open door. Inside, Wells found the office where his guards had lived. Two narrow cots were shoved against the back wall. A hot plate sat on an aged wooden desk. The cigarette smell was Eastern European, tobacco with a hint of formaldehyde. A laptop sat on the floor, silently playing porn. Wells clicked off the website, flipped down the screen. He’d take the computer. Maybe its browser history would have some clues.

First, a phone. A pile of dirty clothes lay between the cots. Wells grabbed the jeans that lay on top, found a mobile phone, a burner. He called Shafer. Home, cell, office. But Mason had spoken true. Shafer wasn’t answering. Wells had wanted to be sure he had protection arranged before calling his son or ex-wife. Instead, it looked like he’d have to call them first, tell them to go to ground. They’d be terrified. And furious.

Then he thought of Duto. For a few anxious seconds Wells couldn’t remember the man’s number. At last he did. Two rings, then—

“Who’s this?”

“John.”

“You’re not dead.” There was a touch of something like irony in Duto’s voice, a late-night radio host talking to a regular caller.

“Don’t sound so happy. Where’s Ellis?”

“He called three days ago. Said he knew who was behind this, but he had no proof, no one would believe him. I told him to tell me, we’d figure out a play. He said he couldn’t because they were holding you and he was sure they’d kill you if he told anyone. But now you’re out.”

“I’m out.”

“You know who it is?”

“No. I’m walking into the White House, but when I’m out I’ll call Shafer, tell him you’re okay, make him tell me, assuming he actually knows and this isn’t a slow-motion breakdown—”

“First you have to get the FBI to put Evan and Heather in protective custody, and make sure Anne knows there’s a threat.”

“Immediate threat?”

“My family.”

“The President’s briefing a bunch of us, and I think he’s hitting Iran, I mean within the hour, I’m not sure how, but this could be our last chance to stop this thing—”

“Vinny, listen to me—” Wells gripped the phone so tightly he feared he might crack the housing. “I don’t care if you’re about to meet God Himself. Something happens to Evan, you don’t have to worry about cancer, a heart attack, a jihadi coming for you. I will slice you up—” He felt his anger running away and didn’t care. He meant every word.

“Take a breath, John, I get it—”

Wells imagined Duto blinking his heavy eyelids the way he did when he wanted to convey that he understood. “Don’t John me—”

“I get it. Tell me where to find them.”

Wells gave Duto their addresses, phone numbers.

“You have my word.”

“All right. Text me when Evan’s okay. And tell Shafer to call.”

“Yes, sir. Any other orders, sir?”

Wells hung up, called Evan. Who didn’t answer. Not entirely surprising, considering what the number must have looked like on his caller ID.

“It’s your dad,” Wells said. “I think it’s around eight-thirty where you are.” Eleven hours behind. “Next hour or two, the FBI is going to get in touch, ask you to come with them. Please don’t argue. It’s for your own safety, I promise, and it won’t be too long. Just trust me, okay? I’ll explain later.”

He hung up, called Heather. He was almost glad when she didn’t answer. Whether the threat was real or fake, she’d be furious with him. He left a message like the one he’d left for Evan and clicked off. He would leave Duto to call Anne. Mason hadn’t threatened her directly, and he needed to move. And part of him didn’t feel ready to talk to her, not from this place.

Beside the cots, a door opened into the plant manager’s private bathroom, a grubby toilet and a narrow shower. Wells turned the plastic knob. He was pleasantly surprised when the showerhead blasted a jet of water, doubly surprised to find it hot. He pulled off his spattered T-shirt and underwear and stepped in. The blood sloughed off his legs and reddened the shower’s plastic floor. Wells scrubbed himself down with a bar of soap that smelled like it had been marinated in cheap perfume, forced himself out after three minutes. No shave.

The younger guard had kept his clothes neatly folded in a powder-blue Adidas gym bag under his cot. His jeans and windbreaker were slightly small, but Wells could walk the world now without catching a cop’s eye. The sneakers were okay, too, a size small but they’d do. Wells shoved the pistol in the waistband of his jeans. Inside the desk drawer, he found a keyless car fob, two passports, a rubber-banded stack of Turkish lira, a lighter, another phone. All a boy could want.

Suddenly the phone in the drawer rang, its screen lighting up with a local number. Then the phone in his pocket began to buzz. Maybe Mason had noticed that the webcam wasn’t working anymore. Someone would be over here soon. Wells tossed the laptop and everything from the desk drawer into the guard’s blue bag. He slung the bag over his shoulder as he left the office behind.

The factory’s main floor was unlit. But the pallid winter sun threw enough light through the barred windows for Wells to realize it had been cleaned recently. He didn’t see piles of trash or puddles of grease. This building wasn’t a squat. Someone maintained it. Someone paid for the phones, hired the guards, registered the cars. No matter how good they were, they had to have left a trail. Now Shafer knew where that trail led, or so he’d told Duto. Wells wondered why Shafer felt so boxed, so sure no one would believe him.

Wells reached the front door. Chained shut. He turned around, wondering how much time he had. At the back, in the center of the building, a fire door was unlocked. Wells pushed it open, stepped outside for the first time in nearly a week.

He found himself in a weedy parking lot surrounded by a fence. It sat atop a low rise, the land around it semi-rural, semi-industrial. Maybe five hundred meters away, four new prefab buildings were stacked close together. Past them was a row of high-voltage electric power lines and a four-lane highway. There was no sign of the Bosphorus or any of Istanbul’s landmarks. Wells could have been anywhere.

The guards’ ride, a four-door Nissan, was tucked behind two Dumpsters. Wells unlocked the doors, slid inside, pushed the starter button. The car hummed alive, the screen in the center console lighting up with a map of Turkey. The GPS showed he was on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, maybe thirty miles east of central Istanbul. Wells figured his best bet was to head back to the city center, the street where he’d first tracked Mason. He was sure the man had an apartment there, though maybe not in the building Wells had seen him exit. Then the guard’s phone rang again. And Wells realized that he didn’t need to go anywhere, didn’t need to hunt. Soon enough Mason would come to him.

27

The drones came from every direction, all at once.

One, two, a dozen. Gray against the gray morning sky, but so low they couldn’t be missed. They flew slowly over the wide city, over avenues, markets, highways, and parks, all heading for the same target, Imam Khomeini Square, the heart of Tehran. Their engines filled the air with a high whine, an unsettling sound, a mosquito that couldn’t be slapped. On the streets below, men and women tilted their heads up to see the bombs hanging from the drones’ long skinny wings.

Then they ran.

The air-raid sirens came too late. The network that connected Iran’s radar installations had failed minutes before the Predators crossed into the country’s airspace. By the time air defense commanders in Tehran sorted out the frantic phone calls from Kohkilooyeh and Lengeh and the other stations, they no longer needed radar to know what was happening. They could step out of their reinforced concrete shelter to see for themselves.

As they frantically tried to scramble the fighter pilots at Mehrabad, the sonic booms began. Seven streaks appeared in the west, a V formation, not even two hundred meters above the earth. One lucky photographer, a film student at the University of Tehran, managed two clear shots. They revealed a fighter with a split tail, no visible weapons, twin rear winglets. An F-22A Raptor, the most advanced fighter ever built.

The Raptors left a trail of shattered windows and howling dogs. Children shouted as their parents tugged them inside. Not everyone ran. The pious went to their knees, bowed their heads, trusting Allah would protect them.

At the eastern edge of the city, the jets turned in a tight semicircle and retraced their path, creating a second wave of panic. Three minutes later, they were gone. Meanwhile, the drones were dropping their bombs, aiming at the runways of Mehrabad, putting the airport out of commission. The Iranian fighters were now grounded, and the missile arrays around the city couldn’t fire without working radar. The city was defenseless.

Then the attack ended.

The drones turned north. Barely half an hour after they first appeared, they reached the Caspian Sea. Five kilometers offshore, they tipped their noses down and followed one another into the sea, a series of spinning suicide dives that would have pleased the original kamikazes.

Their operators were unhurt.

It was nearly midnight on the East Coast, but the major media outlets were staffed and ready. Two hours before, the White House Press Office had warned bureau chiefs at the networks and the big papers that it would release a statement from the President just after midnight. Remember when we killed bin Laden? Like that. Only bigger. No details.

The newsroom cynics assumed a sex scandal involving the President and his National Security Advisor. Maybe the indictment of a senior cabinet member. A soon-to-be-fired producer at MSNBC speculated over Twitter that the President had lung cancer. When the White House didn’t bother to rebut the report, it echoed across the Internet’s peanut gallery, picking up details.

Then, at 11:56 p.m., even before the F-22s cleared Iranian airspace, the first reports of the strike on Tehran arrived from the official Iranian news service. Five minutes later, the President’s press secretary appeared in the White House pressroom to release a speech that the President had just recorded in the Oval Office. No questions tonight. Just this. He’ll have a full press conference tomorrow.

“My fellow Americans, a few minutes ago I ordered our Air Force to carry out a mission over Tehran, Iran’s capital city. I authorized this operation because we have recently learned that the Iranian government is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously believed. To be specific, in the last few days the United States has seized more than a kilogram of weapons-grade uranium, which we have concluded was produced by the Iranian nuclear program. Our intelligence agencies now believe that Iran may have produced enough highly enriched uranium to build several nuclear bombs.”

The President wore a charcoal-gray suit with an American flag on the lapel, a white shirt, a blue tie. His face was relaxed, his tone low and confident, the voice of a man certain in his decision.

“For more than a decade, the government of Iran has misled the United States and the international community about its efforts to create a nuclear arsenal. This most recent deception is the most serious yet. We can no longer tolerate these lies, especially since we have indications that Iran may ultimately try to bring nuclear weapons onto American soil. Let me be clear. The United States would view such an action as an act of war.

“Our attack today was precise and calibrated. We aimed only at infrastructure and minimized any loss of life. In fact, the Secretary of Defense informs me that we did not kill a single Iranian, soldier or civilian, with our action. But the Iranian government must know that our planes and drones can overwhelm its defenses and destroy its military. The Iranian people must know that our forces can quickly bring their economy to its knees.”

The camera pushed in toward his face, a touch of showmanship. “We know that not everyone in Iran agrees with this nuclear program. In fact, our intelligence community believes that its existence may have been kept secret even from senior Iranian government officials. We want peace, not war. But we can no longer allow Iran to pretend to negotiate with us or the international community while it builds a dangerous nuclear stockpile. Tonight I call upon the government of Iran to end for all time its efforts to build nuclear weapons. As a first step, I demand that Iran open all its nuclear facilities and the records of its weaponization programs to United States inspectors. These demands are not negotiable. Based on what I have learned in the last few weeks, I can no longer outsource American safety to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA’s inspectors are hardworking, but Iran has obstructed and mocked them at every turn. I am setting a deadline of two weeks from today for the Iranian government to respond to my demand.”

The President pursed his lips, nodded.

“Two weeks is plenty of time if the Iranian government cooperates. No time at all if it doesn’t. In case the regime doubts my resolve, tomorrow morning, I will ask the House and Senate to approve a broad military campaign against Iran. Air and missile strikes will be its first wave. But make no mistake. I will also ask for authorization for an invasion as a last resort if necessary. I have already discussed the evidence with selected senior members of Congress, as well as the leaders of Britain and France. They agree it’s convincing. They agree it demands a response. Tomorrow, the Secretaries of State and Defense will make a broader presentation to Congress. We will publicize as much evidence as possible. I want the American people and the world community to see why we must take action. However, I will not ask for United Nations approval for military action. This threat is to the United States, and it demands an American response.

“Ultimately, the choice for war or peace will be made in Tehran. If the Iranian government drops its nuclear programs and opens its doors to inspection, the United States will gladly end the threat of military action. Our goal is not regime change. It is only to ensure that the American people do not face a new threat from weapons of mass destruction.”

The President had hardly moved during his speech. Now he leaned toward the camera.

“But if Iran is unwilling to cooperate, rest assured that I will do everything necessary to protect our homeland. Other nations have mistaken America’s resolve before. They have always regretted the error.

“May God bless the United States of America. Thank you, and good night.”

28

Wells watched from the back left corner of the textile factory as two BMW sedans stopped at the factory’s rear gate, a hundred meters away. A man stepped out from the lead BMW, pulled open the gate, slipped back into the car as it came through. He didn’t bother closing the gate. These guys obviously didn’t plan to stay long.

The sedans raced past an empty guard shack and across the trash-strewn lot. They stopped hard about ten meters from the factory’s rear fire exit. They parked side by side, the width of a car between them. Not too close, so the guys could cover each other if they came out under fire. Four front doors swung open. Four men stepped out. Three were compact and muscular and carried Heckler & Koch UMPs, fat, stubby machine pistols favored by Special Forces soldiers.

The fourth was the man Wells had desperately hoped to see. The fourth was Mason.

Wells edged backward, into the alley along the left side of the factory. They couldn’t see him unless they came for him, and he’d see them first. He had hidden the guards’ Nissan in the smaller parking lot at the factory’s front end. He’d correctly figured that Mason and his men would use the gate in back rather than the one in front, which was chained and padlocked.

On top of the dead spy cam and unanswered calls, the missing Nissan would lead Mason to fear the worst. He would have no choice but to take his guys inside. Wells had walked the building’s perimeter, seen for himself that the fire exit was the only unlocked door. Once Mason went in, Wells would have him pinned.

Wells had a Glock 19 and two spare mags he’d taken from the guardroom. He also had improvised a Molotov cocktail from a T-shirt, an empty bottle of raki, and gasoline he’d siphoned from the Nissan. Molotovs were poor man’s grenades, more messy than deadly. But at the right moment, they could be devastating.

The Nissan had proven useful in one final way. Wells had broken off the car’s right-side mirror with a tire iron and bashed the plastic housing until the glass inside was free. He’d propped the mirror against the fence that marked the factory’s property line, about ten feet from the corner where he hid. The resulting view wasn’t exactly high-definition, but it let him see the men without having to poke his head out.

Wells watched as Mason pointed at the roof and spoke to his men. Then he and two mercs ran for the back door, weapons drawn. They disappeared from Wells’s view as the door creaked open, then slammed shut. The third merc stood alone between the cars.

So Mason had seen that Wells might be trying to trap him. Even so, Wells thought he had made the wrong play. He should either have left two men outside or risked bringing everyone inside. A lone guard couldn’t do much but get himself killed. Mason’s close-combat inexperience was showing. A twitch of a lyric passed through Wells: It was a small mistake/Sometimes that’s all it takes.

He couldn’t remember the singer’s name. After he killed Mason, he’d look it up.

On the other hand… Wells had wound up chained to a wall the last time he’d gone after Mason. Underestimating your opponent was the biggest mistake of all.

The guard tracked the edges of the building with his H&K, starting at the left corner, up and across the roofline, down to the right corner. When he was finished, he swung the muzzle across the front of the building and repeated himself. He looked like a pro to Wells, a combat veteran who would open up without hesitation.

Wells counted twenty-four Mississippis as the guy made two passes. By now Mason and his men would have reached the second floor. Wells wanted them to be near the cell when he made his move. He needed as much time as possible to deal with the guy out here before the others came back.

Wells imagined Mason would stay behind as the mercenaries cleared the catwalk. He’d watch for movement on the empty first floor, nervously tapping the phone in his pocket as he wondered what to tell his boss. In their short acquaintance, she hadn’t struck Wells as the type to tolerate mistakes. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, bullet in your head…

Even as he pictured what was happening inside, Wells watched the mirror. The guard swept his machine pistol over the roof of the building for the third time. Wells slid to the corner, peeked out. The guard was a hundred feet from Wells, maybe one-twenty. Back in Kenya this distance had given him problems, but he’d spent a lot of time practicing his shooting since then. Plus the H&K wasn’t as big an edge as it seemed. Short-barrel, short-stock machine pistols tended to bounce. Shooting accurately with them took years of practice. Wells would find out soon enough how well this guy was trained.

The guard looked at the top-right corner of the factory now, as far from Wells as he would be. Wells stepped out, pistol high in his hands, took a quiet step. The guy stood at a slight angle to him. He extended his arms, a shooter’s stance, squeezed the trigger twice. Two loud cracks echoed off the factory behind him. The shots thumped true—

Too late Wells realized the guy was wearing a bullet-resistant vest. Not the ceramic plates that infantry wore, those would have been obvious. A thin Kevlar vest like the ones cops hid under their uniforms. They weren’t much use against an assault rifle, but Wells didn’t have an assault rifle. The Glock fired a medium-velocity 9-millimeter round, and Kevlar could stop those. Wells knew what had happened because the guy didn’t crumple when the round hit, didn’t go down all at once with blood spurting. Instead, the impact of the rounds pushed him sideways and he stumbled back against the BMW farther from Wells.

Wells put himself in the mercenary’s position. He would feel like he’d been punched hard. He might even have a broken rib. But he’d realize quickly that he wasn’t seriously injured and that he had a huge tactical edge. He had the vest. He had a better weapon. He had reinforcements coming. He’d see that all he needed was to hold Wells at bay until his buddies got out of the building.

Wells had two choices. Both lousy. Run for the front of the building, where he’d left the guards’ Nissan, and hope he could drive out before Mason’s men trapped him. Or kill this guy before the others showed up.

He’d never much liked to run.

Wells raised the Glock, fired three times more, aiming high on the chest. If he was lucky he’d catch the guy with a head shot, but he didn’t expect to be lucky. He wanted to force the guy down, make him go to ground between the sedans. One round hit the guy square in the chest and knocked him backward off the second BMW. All those hours at the range had paid off. Too bad Wells had picked a target he couldn’t kill.

The merc dove out of sight. He’d gather himself, decide to quit playing defense. He’d crawl or crab-walk toward the BMW that was nearer Wells, use the hood for cover while he lit Wells up. That’s what Wells would do, anyway. He hoped the guard was reading from the same playbook.

Wells jammed his pistol in his waistband. He pulled the lighter he’d stolen and the Molotov. Making a Molotov was art, not science. Wells had torn a thin strip of cotton from a T-shirt, doused it in gas and stuffed one end in the bottle, which was three-quarters full of fuel. If the T-shirt was too soaked, the bottle would explode before Wells could throw it. Too dry, and the flame would die in midair.

Wells flicked the lighter alive, touched flame to fabric. The fire roared instantly. Wells threw the Molotov in a high slow spiral like he was looking for a receiver on a fade route. The BMWs were parked maybe eighty feet away. Wells figured if he landed the Molotov within five or six feet of the merc, he’d have a chance. The pavement would shatter the bottle, spread burning gas in every direction. As the bottle left his hand, Wells grabbed his pistol and angled toward the back of the BMW. He wanted the merc to look at him, not the Molotov. He hoped that the merc had been so focused on getting into position to counterattack that he hadn’t even seen Wells throwing it.

Wells took three steps. He looked over his shoulder just as the Molotov landed on the edge of the nearer BMW’s front hood. It struck on the passenger side, close to the windshield, and exploded in a ball of fire that seemed half gas, half liquid. A river of flaming gasoline poured off the hood—

The merc screamed and jumped to escape the flames engulfing him. The sweater he wore over his vest burned wildly. The vest itself was fire-resistant, but it couldn’t protect the merc’s head or arms from the flames coming off his clothes. Worse, glass from the exploding bottle had raked his face. He screamed and clawed at his eyes. If he had been thinking clearly, he would have realized his facial injuries were agonizing but not life-threatening. He would have run to dry pavement and rolled to put out the flames. But of course he wasn’t thinking clearly. He was desperate, half blind, and in shock, his hair and skin burning with an acrid choking scent.

The moment screamed for mercy, but Wells only had a pistol. He fired, moved. Two shots, two steps. He needed to end this before the others came through the fire door for him. Two more shots. Two more steps. Wells was working his way through this magazine in a hurry. No matter. With two spares, his biggest concern right now was a tired trigger finger. Out of ammo, an instructor at Ranger school had told him once. The three saddest words in the English language. You know what’s worse? Dying with leftover magazines on your belt. Two more shots. Wells was hoping to manage a head shot through sheer repetition.

He did. The guard stopped screaming as suddenly as he’d started. His body dropped like a marionette free of its strings and thumped down insensate. Nothing left of him but flesh already cremating. Maybe Wells had been merciful after all.

How many seconds since his first shot? Twenty? Wells ran for the BMW. As he reached it, the fire door swung open. Mason. Wells fired twice. Mason disappeared like a groundhog who’d misread the calendar. The door slammed shut behind him. Just in time, too, because the Glock’s slide snapped open to reveal an empty chamber.

Wells thumbed the release. He shook out the empty mag as he grabbed the replacement in his pocket. In one smooth motion, he slipped the fresh mag into the well. It clicked home and Wells released the slide. He fired off two quick shots to be sure the door would stay closed long enough for him to consider his next move. If he could consider anything over the smell of a slow-cooking corpse.

He could keep the guys pinned inside for a few minutes, but they’d find a way out. If nothing else, one of them would shoot his way through the factory’s front door. Wells couldn’t depend on the police to arrive in time, either. The plant was far enough from the nearest occupied building that anyone who heard the shots might mistake them for engine backfires, at least at first. And Wells didn’t necessarily want to be at the factory when the cops showed. They would stick him in custody for days or weeks, until they sorted out what had happened. By then, the war might already have started.

Wells poked his head into the BMW to see if Mason’s men had left a key in the ignition, then realized his mistake. Like many new cars, the BMW didn’t use an actual key. It had a push-button starter that worked when its sensors detected a fob with the correct encryption. Maybe Mason or his men had left the key in the center console for a quick escape. Nope.

Then Wells realized. If the dead merc on the other side of the sedan was carrying the key in his pocket, it would be close enough to trigger the BMW’s sensors. If the heat from the fire hadn’t cooked it. Wells slid inside, pressed the starter.

The car hummed alive.

Wells set the seat back as far as it would go and crouched behind the steering wheel, getting as low as he could. Even if the tires were ruined, he was sure the rims were all right. The fire hadn’t burned long enough to melt steel.

For his purposes, running on rims would be fine. He put the car in drive, rested his foot on the brake pedal. Ten seconds passed.

The door swung open. A burst of fire followed, an H&K on full auto. Covering fire, the guys inside trying to figure out if Wells had run for the gate or disappeared around the side of the factory. Wells guessed Mason and one merc were back here, as the other tried to shoot his way out the front door. A second burst, this one from the far end of the factory, confirmed the theory.

Another covering burst, and then Mason stepped into the doorway. He fired twice in the general direction of the sedan, then turned toward the Dumpsters and fired twice more. The merc stepped out from the door behind him and moved toward the corner where Wells had first hidden, firing a five-shot burst.

They were shooting blind, spraying rounds in the broadest possible arc. Not the best strategy, but then they were a wee bit jumpy after seeing what Wells had done to the others. They hadn’t figured out yet that he was directly in front of them. The BMW’s engine was nearly silent at idle, and the puddle of gasoline was still smoking, providing extra cover. Even so, Wells knew they’d see him soon enough.

And then the merc looked at the BMW. He turned, swinging the H&K around—

Wells twisted the steering wheel with his left hand, raised the Glock with his right. He stamped the gas and the sedan roared ahead. The merc got the machine pistol up and shattered the windshield with a half-dozen rounds. But Wells kept coming until the BMW slammed him against the wall and tossed the H&K out of his hands.

The brick behind the merc propped him up and channeled the blow into his lower body. His hips and the big bones in his legs shattered. Only the fact that the BMW was pinning him kept him upright.

Wells wasn’t wearing his seat belt. He flew at the steering wheel, but its airbag exploded out and smothered him. He had expected the crash. Even so, he was disoriented. In television commercials, airbag inflation looked pillow soft. In reality the bag came out hard enough to snap a toddler’s neck, the reason that child seats were always put in the rear. Two seconds passed before Wells pushed himself away from the bag wrapped around his face. He looked up — and saw the merc leaning forward, his face white and stretched in agony. He clawed at the BMW’s hood like he wanted to tear the car apart. Wells followed the merc’s eyes down to the hood and the Heckler & Koch. It had landed close to the windshield. The merc got a hand on it—

Wells raised his Glock, fired through the windshield, again, again, until the back of the merc’s head exploded. The machine pistol fell from his hands and clattered against the hood. His corpse sagged off the wall, his upper body leaning forward, his legs still pinned. Wells shoved the BMW into reverse, feathered the gas. And went nowhere. He reached for the starter and then remembered that deploying airbags automatically killed a car’s battery and cut its engine. He was stuck in a dead car.

The front and back passenger-side windows exploded almost simultaneously, kicking glass through the car like a burst piñata. Mason. Wells had forgotten him. He couldn’t be more than twenty feet away.

Get out. Wells popped open his door and twisted his body onto the pavement so that he faced the BMW. Mason was somewhere on the other side, though Wells couldn’t see him. The driver’s-side window exploded in a rain of glass over Wells’s head.

He grabbed the machine pistol, lifted it sideways, squeezed the trigger, firing blindly across the car, five shots and then five more, anything to force Mason away. Wells didn’t know how big a magazine the H&K had, probably thirty- or forty-round. Most of them had to be gone. He still couldn’t see Mason, but he heard a grunt and wondered if he’d scored. Then footsteps backing off, and more shots.

Wells edged to the back of his ruined BMW and peeked out over the trunk. Mason was crouched maybe fifty feet away behind the other BMW. Wells wondered why he hadn’t simply taken off and then realized he must not have the key.

Mason saw him peeking. And waved.

In answer, Wells popped off a single shot with the Glock. He felt like one of those dumbass jihadis he’d trained beside in Afghanistan, pistol in one hand, H&K in the other. All he needed was a sword strapped to his belt.

Mason appeared content to wait. He crouched silently, his pistol propped on the trunk, almost daring Wells to come at him. He raised his head long enough for Wells to see that he was smiling. Enjoying himself. Somehow the smirk made Wells think of Evan and Heather. Maybe Duto had messaged him. Maybe they were safe. But Wells couldn’t afford to take his eyes off Mason long enough to find out. The thought of the phone in his pocket maddened him. He forced himself to forget it, focus on the problem at hand.

Mason’s grin widened. Like he knew exactly what Wells had just done. Like he’d read Wells’s mind. “What now?” Mason said.

“Put the pistol on the ground, walk out where I can see you, and lie prone. It’s over.”

“Please.”

Shots echoed from the front of the building.

“He’s out now,” Mason said. “Coming around the building. He comes up my side, we’ll get in this car and drive away. He’s got the key. He comes up your side, he’ll be behind you and we’ll have you.”

“Whatever happens to me, this game you’re running, it’s done.”

“You don’t know what happened today in Tehran.”

“Tell me.”

“You don’t have me in custody, you don’t have anything—”

As if on cue, the first siren sounded, European-style, woo-oo, woo-oo, a long way off—

Mason’s head cocked toward the sound. It was a small mistake.

Wells left the H&K on the trunk and stood with the Glock in both hands and sighted Mason’s head and locked in and squeezed the trigger three times, one two three, the pistol solid in his hands. Mason raised his own pistol and managed to get one round off before Wells’s second shot caught him in the jaw and tore through his throat. He dropped the pistol and sat on his ass on the cracked pavement. Wells ran for him, ready to put him down if he managed to raise the pistol. But every time he lifted it off the ground, it slipped through his fingers like it weighed a thousand pounds.

Wells knelt beside him, put the Glock to Mason’s forehead. The blood leaked out of his mouth and half his jaw lay on the pavement next to him.

“Month ago, I didn’t even know you existed.”

Mason grunted.

“We were both better off. Any last words?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Mason whispered.

Wells shoved the gun in what was left of Mason’s mouth and put the pistol against his soft palate and pulled the trigger.

He ran back to the second merc he’d killed, the one he’d pinned against the wall. The guy’s pants were soaked with blood, but Wells sifted through his pockets until he found a BMW key fob. Mason and the first guy he’d killed had carried keys to the car Wells had wrecked, so this fob must belong to the undamaged sedan.

Once the police arrived and found these corpses, the game would be over. It would have to be. Whatever Mason had meant about Tehran, the fact that his body was here would prove beyond doubt that he’d faked his own death. Everything else would follow. The obvious conclusion would be that he’d killed James Veder and that he’d been running an op here. The agency and White House would have to throw out the evidence the mole had given them.

Wells slipped into the undamaged BMW, pushed the starter. The engine came to life. As it did, the phone he’d taken from the guards buzzed. He pulled it, looked down. A text from Duto. Two words. Everyone safe.

He put the car in reverse, swung around, cruised for the gate. He put down the windows and let the winter air rush in. Outside the gate he found a paved two-lane road. He turned right, toward the power lines and highway, already thinking of his next move. He’d have to call Duto, arrange to get out of Turkey.

He had driven halfway to the power lines when he saw two cars speeding toward him. Another BMW, followed by a Mercedes, two men in the front seats of each. As the cars blew past, the drivers looked at him like they recognized him but couldn’t figure out why. Wells had the same eerie feeling. Then he saw the woman sitting in the backseat of the Mercedes. The woman who’d captured him, who’d put the needle in his neck.

Good. Let her go to the factory, see what he’d done. The police would take care of her, too.

Only later — much too late — would Wells realize he’d made a mistake. And not a small one.

29

How often have I said to you that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

Shafer and Duto sat in Duto’s suite in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, the curtains open to a glimpse of the Capitol dome. It was nearly two a.m. Normally the Capitol complex would be empty at this hour. Tonight the echoing footfalls outside were constant, as aides scurried to their offices to put out press releases and figure out what their bosses should think and say about the attack.

Real surprises were even rarer in Washington than anywhere else. The never-ending war between congressional Democrats and Republicans was as tightly choreographed as a Hollywood fight scene, with the same goal: milking maximum audience response at minimum risk to the players. The White House used focus groups, polls, and trial balloons disguised as leaks to test public reaction to every move the President might make.

But tonight’s attack counted as a real surprise. Now CNN played silently on a television beside Duto’s desk, drones flying, men and women running along a broad boulevard. The words crawling below announced the arrival of a new global crisis: PRESIDENT SETS ULTIMATUM OVER NUCLEAR PROGRAM… THREATENS WAR… DRONES STRIKE TEHRAN AIRPORT… IRAN FOREIGN MINISTER: ATTACK “CRUEL, COWARDLY, UNPROVOKED”…

Duto flicked off the television. “What are you talking about, Ellis?”

“Sherlock Holmes to Watson. Eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth? Good enough for a fictional nineteenth-century detective, good enough for me.”

“Point?”

“Motive is the key. Always. But we keep tripping on the same rock, the countries that want Iran’s nuclear program stopped bad enough to try this are our allies.”

Duto roused himself, rummaged in his bottom desk drawer for a bottle of Dewar’s and one glass.

“I would have thought Dewar’s beneath a connoisseur such as yourself.”

“Notice I’m not offering you any.” Duto poured an inch into the glass. “Wells gets out and you come right back to life with the sassy talk and everything else. It’s worse than a crush. You’re a groupie. Groupies don’t get to drink. And even worse, you’re repeating yourself. You’ve been talking about motive for two weeks. When do we get to the part I don’t know?”

“Eliminate the Mossad, every other national intelligence service that could do this as a false flag, who’s left?”

“Iran. Trying to get under our skin.”

“Makes even less sense. Why now? They have every reason to want to get the bombs here in secret.”

“So you’re telling me what? That Langley’s right, Reza’s real? After all this.”

“No. Reza tipped us to the Veder assassination, which Mason pulled. If Reza’s real, he and Mason aren’t on the same team. So why would Mason be in Istanbul now? Why kidnap Wells? Only possible explanation is that Mason and Reza are working together, Mason and his guys ran the earlier ops that Reza leaked. Now they’re watching Reza’s back. Ergo, Reza’s not real.”

Duto sipped his scotch. “So Reza’s fake, it’s not Iran, it’s not Israel, it’s nobody.”

“What’s left?”

“Remember at Langley, I tried to brain you with that depth gauge?”

“You weren’t actually hoping to hit me.”

Duto nodded.

“Okay, not Iran, not another intel service—”

“It’s us?”

Shafer was momentarily stumped. He had to admit he had never seriously considered that possibility. He turned the pieces to see if they fit. “Interesting idea… but no. Unless us is actually you, given how long ago it started. And who else would it be? Too complicated for DOD. State isn’t interested in starting wars.”

“NPR.”

Shafer laughed.

“Just tell me, Ellis.”

“If it’s not a national service, the only possibility left is a private group.”

“No. Way too expensive. Not just the ops, but the way they’ve covered their tracks. Coms, logistics, SOG-class operators. Low nine figures, minimum.”

“That’s my point. The money makes it improbable. Not impossible. Look at the evidence. A small team, and as far as we can tell, Mason did all the recruiting himself. They’ve gone to incredible lengths to make sure we never get pictures. Like they know that if a single thread unravels, it’s all over, because they’ve got no government protection. And the ops are medium-tech, not high.”

“Tell me who has two hundred million to spend on this. And don’t say a Saudi prince. Abdullah isn’t putting up with that nonsense anymore. Moving that much money is a problem, too. You gotta have a clean source.”

“Like a casino.”

Duto put down his scotch, closed his eyes, massaged his temples like he’d come down with the world’s worst migraine. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Shafer took advantage of Duto’s momentary blindness to grab his glass.

Duto opened his eyes. “Aaron Duberman. Am I right?”

Shafer raised the tumbler. “Salud, Vinny.”

“Gimme back my scotch.”

Aaron Duberman was a billionaire twenty-five times over, according to Forbes. In the nineties, he had turned around his failing casino company by rebranding it as the sci-fi-themed 88 Gamma and aggressively courting young Asian players. But it was Macao that had made Duberman one of the wealthiest men in the world. Along with Sheldon Adelson, Duberman had expanded into the former Chinese colony when more-established casino companies stayed away.

Now Duberman’s 88 Gamma dwarfed its competitors. The company ran casinos on six continents, an empire that reached from Sydney to Buenos Aires. Duberman’s fortune defied the imagination.

Two years before, he had married an Israeli model who at the time was precisely half his age, twenty-eight to fifty-six. The wedding was held in the Bahamas, on Gamma Key, Duberman’s private island. To entertain the eight hundred guests, he’d hired The Rolling Stones, The Who, Kanye West, and Jay-Z. He and his wife now had twin one-year-old boys. Besides Gamma Key, they divided their time between estates in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, London, Cannes, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Hong Kong.

In the last election, Duberman had given $196 million to support the President’s campaign. No one had ever spent more. Political analysts still argued whether the President could have won without it. Yet Duberman had never publicly discussed what, if anything, he wanted in return.

During 88 Gamma’s first few years in Macao, Duberman had spent tens of millions of dollars to promote a better relationship between the United States and China. News organizations had questioned the spending, and human rights groups accused him of being a pawn of a totalitarian government and letting greed cloud his judgment. Duberman called them fools. “I’ll make just as much money in Macao even if there’s a new Cold War,” he said. He’d spent even more money to promote Israel’s ties to the United States, and been even more vocal.

But about five years ago, he had suddenly slashed his spending on both causes. And while he donated more money than ever to presidential and congressional campaigns, he refused to discuss politics.

“People come to my casinos to have a good time, they don’t care what I think about legalizing pot or the West Bank or health care,” he told The Wall Street Journal in his last interview, eighteen months before. “For every customer who likes what I say, I risk losing two more. So I decided to shut my mouth.”

“Okay, make the case,” Duto said.

“One. He can spare the money. Man spent forty million dollars on his wedding.”

“One.”

“Two. He has endless untraceable cash. Macao alone must handle millions of dollars in paper currency every day. The company as a whole has to be wiring hundreds of millions of dollars a week. Even if we were looking we couldn’t find the problem transfers.”

“Two.”

“Three. He’s got an open line to the President. Not saying the man does whatever he says, just that Duberman has a chance to push his views quietly.”

“Three.”

“Four. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that he’s gone totally quiet about Israel? I found an op-ed he wrote for Haaretz six years back, he called Iran the greatest threat to both the Middle East and the United States and said America had to stand with Israel. He was so vocal, and now nothing? He cut off his China funding, too. Like he’s trying to keep anyone from wondering what he’s doing, why he’s spending all that money to get close to the President.”

“I’m not sure that’ll convince anyone. It’s too easy to say the guy just changed his mind, realized politics and casinos don’t mix.”

“Nobody changes their mind about anything past fifty.”

“Give me something that’s not open-source.”

“Five. When Mason went off the rails in Hong Kong, you know where he spent most of his time? None other than the 88 Gamma Macao, according to his file.”

“Thought he was fired for failing a drug test.”

“He also lost at least two and a half million dollars playing blackjack.”

“Nobody investigated?”

“There was no point. The money was his, an inheritance, and he hadn’t done enough work in HK to know anything anybody would pay for. Hassim Sharif, the captain of the Kara Six, he had a gambling jones, too. How much you want to bet the 88 Gamma Corporation got some of his cash?”

Duto reached for the Dewar’s bottle and tipped it to his mouth. He drew a long slug, nearly coughed it back, but sputtered it down.

“Nicely done,” Shafer said.

“Accusing the President’s biggest donor of treason. Next best thing to the man himself.”

“I’m right, Vinny.”

“I don’t disagree. In terms of actual evidence. We have a connection from Mason, who’s dead, as far as the seventh floor is concerned, to 88 Gamma Macao. Anything else?”

They sat in silence, Shafer sipping his glass, Duto sipping his bottle.

“Least you see why I didn’t tell you before,” Shafer said finally. “Why I said we were beat. Especially with Wells in the tank.”

“Maybe your boy got that picture of Mason on the way out.”

“Let’s hope so.” Shafer looked at his watch. “Wells called, what, two hours ago?”

“Yeah. I didn’t tell you yet, but he said Mason threatened his kid. And the ex, Heather. He made me promise to call the Feds, get them protected.”

“Tell me you did, Vinny.”

“Of course I did. Threatened to cut me up if I didn’t.”

“At least now I know why he rolled for them,” Shafer said.

“Point is, if Wells finds Mason, I seriously doubt the man will be alive for a debrief.”

“A body would do just fine.”

30

Salome mumbled under her breath, the filthiest curses she knew. Directed at herself.

She was a fool. The proof was the corpse leaking blood all over the trunk of her Mercedes. This day should have been the sweetest of her life, the finish of everything she had worked toward for a half-decade and more.

Instead, she was forced to wonder if John Wells knew enough, could prove enough, to undo what she’d done. Wells. A man she’d already caught, a man who should already be dead. The threat to his family had been fake, a bluff. She wished it were real. At this moment, she would gladly kill his son, everyone he cared about.

She shifted her curses to Glenn Mason. Why had she let him convince her that keeping Wells was a good idea? A few days, he’d said. Just to tie Shafer up until this moves past the point of no return. Plus we might have questions for him.

As a rule, she didn’t like keeping prisoners. They had to be hidden, fed, guarded. There was always a risk they’d escape. They could ask Wells whatever they needed to know when he woke up, then shoot him, dump his body into the Black Sea. Mason told her not to worry. We’ll chain him to a wall, won’t even unlock him for the toilet. The guy’s tough, he’s not Houdini. And he won’t want to risk his kid. A week at most, then I watch him beg for mercy, put a bullet in his head like he deserves. Those last words should have told her what Mason was doing. So desperate to prove he was a hard case, a killer.

Until today, when Wells showed Mason what a killer really looked like. Now all the king’s horses and all the king’s money couldn’t put Mason’s brain back together again. Salome was short on sympathy. Duke. Over the years he’d proven more skilled at running ops than she’d expected. Somehow she’d forgotten that he was a broken toy. Stupid.

She went back to cursing herself.

The morning could have been much worse. By the time she and her men reached the factory, the sirens were close, only a couple minutes out. She stepped out of her car and looked at the bloody mess around her, the corpses and wrecked car. Nothing would explain it away.

She wondered if she should just bundle Mason’s body in the trunk and take off. But even without Mason, the factory offered plenty of evidence to support the story Wells would tell once he reached safety. She and her men needed to make the bodies disappear, empty the office where the guards lived, even rip out the post where Wells had been chained. At least she had been smart enough to have tarps and tools stored in the trunks of her cars. When she realized that the feed from the camera in Wells’s cell had gone dead, she’d feared the worst. So the cleanup job wouldn’t take long, an hour at most. But they didn’t have an hour.

A fire wouldn’t work, either. It would just attract more attention. She needed to make sure the cops didn’t come inside. Otherwise she might as well just lock herself in, go down shooting.

Lock herself in—

The answer came to her.

“Ari.” Her bodyguard, the man she trusted more than anyone. He spoke some Turkish, not much, but enough for her purposes. She told him what she wanted. “Just be sure you wait until they’re out of their cars—”

He nodded.

“Your clothes. You can’t look like that.”

He tossed off his suit jacket, pulled off his tie, tore a hole in his shirt, swabbed his arms and legs in the gasoline residue on the pavement. From well dressed to vagrant in seconds. He grabbed the machine pistol lying on the pavement, ran for the gate.

She turned to the others. “We move the burned BMW behind there”—she nodded at the Dumpster—“so no one outside the gate can see it. We wrap the bodies in the tarps, throw them in the trunks. We move the cars into the alley. Then we hide there, too. When the cops get to the back gate, they won’t have anything to see. Let’s go.”

Two sets of sirens were howling close by, oo-ooo, oo-ooo. But as Salome had hoped, they were headed for the front gate, the natural first choice. And the front gate was chained, padlocked, and rusting. It obviously hadn’t been opened in months. The cops would poke at it for a minute or two before they realized they needed to try the back.

The BMW took the most time. It wouldn’t start. The men had to push it while Salome steered. By the time they were done hiding it behind the Dumpster, the cops had already reached the front gate, spent several minutes yelling in Turkish, and left. The sirens screamed away. But she knew where they were headed, to a cross street about two kilometers away that offered access to the road behind the factory.

Salome and her men covered themselves in blood and brains and charred flesh shoving the corpses into the cars. No one spoke, but she knew her men wondered how Wells had done all this by himself. She did too.

They finished and hid in the alley alongside the building just as the sirens rolled to the back gate. Someone shouted angrily through a megaphone in Turkish.

What she’d feared. Ari had locked the gate from the outside, once he was through. But unlike the reinforced front gate, the back had a single chain holding it shut. It would easily give if the cops rammed it. And if they got inside they would see the cars. The game would be up.

Everything rested on Ari.

Suddenly, the cop began shouting even more loudly, but not at them.

Yes.

She’d ordered Ari to come around the corner of the factory just after the police arrived. An H&K in his hands. Not to shoot. A firefight would only make matters worse. He was to play dumb, a barely functional Syrian refugee who had found his way to Istanbul. He was wandering around outside the factory when he stumbled on the H&K. He decided to shoot off a few rounds. He was sorry for any trouble he’d caused. He had no identification, no money. He was very sorry.

The cops would take the H&K. Maybe they’d arrest him. She didn’t know what charges he’d face. But ultimately he hadn’t done anything terrible. He’d work his way through the system and be released. Or maybe they wouldn’t bother bringing him back to the station. They’d beat him, drive him back to the highway, tell him to get out of Istanbul. No matter. Ari could handle himself.

As long as they believed that the shots had come from outside, they’d have no reason to bother coming inside. Whoever had called 155, the Turkish police emergency number, had obviously been too far away to know what was really happening. If the caller had reported anything more than hearing shots, a dozen police cars would have shown up. And they wouldn’t have stopped at the gate, they would have driven through.

Low voices.

Just go. We’ll clean this mess up like it never existed. John Wells can tell whoever he likes whatever he likes. He’ll sound even crazier than he is.

A minute passed. Another. Then the sirens flicked off. The police cruisers turned away from the gate, crunched down the road, their engines fading into the distance.

Forty-nine minutes later, she and her men rolled away. She would wrap the bodies in chains and dump them in the Black Sea. As she should have done with Wells. She should have believed the stories she’d heard. Unarmed, chained to a wall, he’d broken free, killed five of her operatives. Now she had to decide whether to go after Wells with what was left of her team, or disappear and hope that nothing he or Shafer did could stop the war. What the President had done in Tehran this morning couldn’t be undone. The Iranians knew the uranium wasn’t theirs. They wouldn’t understand why the United States had said it was, or why it had attacked them. They would believe the White House and CIA were faking evidence to support an invasion. They would be frightened. And furious. They would never agree to negotiate, much less to open their doors. Their refusal would further inflame the United States. The situation would spiral. By the end of the President’s two-week deadline, the two sides would be headed for war.

Could Wells or Shafer find her by then? Could they find the man behind her?

Duberman had given her carte blanche. But she couldn’t make this decision herself. She reached for a burner phone, punched in a number that began with an 852 prefix. Hong Kong. “We need to talk. I’m coming to Olympus.”

Olympus was Duberman’s mansion on Victoria Peak, which overlooked Hong Kong Harbor. The world’s most expensive real estate. A house near the top of the Peak had recently sold for $230 million. Duberman’s had a better view.

Salome flicked off the phone, tossed it onto the highway. She had hundreds more. She wished she could replace her men as easily. But even with her team crippled, she had to hunt Wells down. She couldn’t just hope he would go away. He knew too much.

She would kill him. The sooner, the better.